\ 


ATS  NORMAL  SCHOO) 

LOS  ANGELAS,  CALIFORNIA 


ANGMJS3, 


AL  SCHOOL 


G.   F.   WATTS 


THE    HABIT    DOES    NOT    MAKE    THE    MONK. 


G.  F.  WATTS 

BY  G.  K.  CHESTERTON 


CHICAGO  NEW  YORK 

RAND,  McNALLY  £f  COMPANY 

FEB          1917 


PRINTED  IN  GREAT  BRITAIN  AT 

THE  BALLANTYNE  PRESS 

LONDON 


Art 
Library 


3 


LIST   OF   PHOTOGRAVURES 

Facing  />. 

THE  HABIT  DOES  NOT  MAKE  THE  MONK     Fronted 

G.  F.  WATTS,  R.A.  8 

THE  RIDER  ON  THE  WHITE  HORSE  10 

LESLIE  STEPHEN  14 

WALTER  CRANE  16 

THE  SLUMBER  OF  THE  AGES  18 

CARDINAL  MANNING  20 

CHAOS  22 

"  FOR  HE  HAD  GREAT  POSSESSIONS  "  26 

AN  IDLE  CHILD  OF  FANCY  28 

THE  MINOTAUR  32 

THE  COURT  OF  DEATH  34 

MATTHEW  ARNOLD  36 

JOHN  STUART  MILL  36 

ROBERT  BROWNING  38 

LORD  TENNYSON  38 

THE  DWELLER  IN  THE  INNERMOST  40 

GEORGE  MEREDITH  42 

ORPHEUS  AND  EURYDICE  44 

HOPE  46 

JONAH  48 


LIST   OF    PHOTOGRAVURES 

Faeittg  p. 

MAMMON  52 

DEATH  CROWNING  INNOCENCE  54 

A  STORY  FROM  BOCCACCIO  56 

LORD  LYTTON  58 

DAWN  60 

EVE  REPENTANT  62 

LOVE  AND  DEATH  64 

WILLIAM  MORRIS  66 

DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  68 

THOMAS  CARLYLE  70 

GOOD  LUCK  TO  YOUR  FISHING  74 

The  Photogravures  are  from  photographs  by  Fredk.  Hollyer. 

Permanent  photographs  of  works  of  Watts,  Rossetti,  Burne- 

Jones,  Holbein,  and  of  pictures  in  the  Dublin  and  Hague 

Galleries  can  be  obtained  of  Fredk.  Hollyer,  9  Pembroke 

Square,  Kensington. 


GEORGE  FREDERICK  WATTS  was  born 
on  23rd  February  1817.  His  whole  rise  and 
career  synchronizes  roughly  with  the  rise 
and  career  of  the  nineteenth  century.  As  a  rule, 
no  doubt,  such  chronological  parallels  are  peculiarly 
fanciful  and  unmeaning.  Nothing  can  be  imagined 
more  idle,  in  a  general  way,  than  talking  about  a 
century  as  if  it  were  some  kind  of  animal  with  a  head  and 
tail,  instead  of  an  arbitrary  length  cut  from  an  un- 
ending scroll.  Nor  is  it  less  erroneous  to  assume  that 
even  if  a  period  be  definitely  vital  or  disturbing,  art 
must  be  a  mirror  of  it ;  the  greatest  political  storm 
flutters  only  a  fringe  of  humanity  ;  poets,  like  brick- 
layers, work  on  through  a  century  of  wars,  and  Bewick's 
birds,  to  take  an  instance,  have  the  air  of  persons 
unaffected  by  the  French  Revolution.  But  in  the 
case  of  Watts  there  are  two  circumstances  which 
render  the  dates  relevant.  The  first  is  that  the  nine- 
teenth century  was  self-conscious,  believed  itself  to 
be  an  idea  and  an  atmosphere,  and  changed  its  name 
from  a  chronological  almost  to  a  philosophical  term. 
I  do  not  know  whether  all  centuries  do  this  or  whether 
an  advanced  and  progressive  organ  called  "  The 
Eleventh  Century  "  was  ever  in  contemplation  in  the 
dawn  of  the  Middle  Ages.  But  with  us  it  is  clear 
that  a  certain  spirit  was  rightly  or  wrongly  associated 
with  the  late  century  and  that  it  called  up  images  and 
thoughts  like  any  historic  or  ritual  date,  like  the  Fourth 

9 


of  July  or  the  First  of  April.  What  these  images  and 
thoughts  were  we  shall  be  obliged  in  a  few  minutes 
and  in  the  interests  of  the  subject  to  inquire.  But 
this  is  the  first  circumstance  which  renders  the  period 
important ;  and  the  second  is  that  it  has  always  been 
so  regarded  by  Watts  himself.  He,  more  than  any 
other  modern  man,  more  than  politicians  who  thun- 
dered on  platforms  or  financiers  who  captured  con- 
tinents, has  sought  in  the  midst  of  his  quiet  and  hidden 
life  to  mirror  his  age.  He  was  born  in  the  white  and 
austere  dawn  of  that  great  reforming  century,  and  he 
has  lingered  after  its  grey  and  doubtful  close.  He 
is  above  all  things  a  typical  figure,  a  survival  of  the 
nineteenth  century. 

It  will  appear  to  many  a  somewhat  grotesque 
matter  to  talk  about  a  period  in  which  most  of  us 
were  born  and  which  has  only  been  dead  a  year  or 
two,  as  if  it  were  a  primal  Babylonian  empire  of  which 
only  a  few  columns  are  left  crumbling  in  the  desert. 
And  yet  such  is,  in  spirit,  the  fact.  There  is  no  more 
remarkable  psychological  element  in  history  than  the 
way  in  which  a  period  can  suddenly  become  unin- 
telligible. To  the  early  Victorian  period  we  have  in 
a  moment  lost  the  key  :  the  Crystal  Palace  is  the 
temple  of  a  forgotten  creed.  The  thing  always 
happens  sharply  :  a  whisper  runs  through  the  salons, 
Mr.  Max  Beerbohm  waves  a  wand  and  a  whole  gene- 
ration of  great  men  and  great  achievement  suddenly 
looks  mildewed  and  unmeaning.  We  see  precisely  the 
same  thing  in  that  other  great  reaction  towards  art 
and  the  vanities,  the  Restoration  of  Charles  II.  In 
that  hour  both  the  great  schools  of  faith  and  valour 
which  had  seemed  either  angels  or  devils  to  all  men  : 
the  dreams  of  Strafford  and  the  great  High  Churchmen 
on  the  one  hand  ;  the  Moslem  frenzy  of  the  English 
Commons,  the  worship  of  the  English  law  upon  the 
10 


THE    RIDER    ON    THE    WHITE    HORSE 


GEORGE    FREDERICK   WATTS 

other  ;  both  seemed  distant  and  ridiculous.  The  new 
Cavalier  despised  the  old  Cavalier  even  more  than  he 
despised  the  Roundhead.  The  last  stand  of  English 
chivalry  dwindled  sharply  to  the  solitary  figure  of  the 
absurd  old  country  gentleman  drinking  wine  out  of  an 
absurd  old  flagon.  The  great  roar  of  Roundhead 
psalms  which  cried  out  that  the  God  of  Battles  was 
loose  in  English  meadows  shrank  to  a  single  snuffle. 
The  new  and  polite  age  saw  the  old  and  serious  one 
exactly  as  we  see  the  early  Victorian  era  :  they  saw  it, 
that  is  to  say,  not  as  splendid,  not  as  disastrous,  not  as 
fruitful,  not  as  infamous,  not  as  good  or  bad,  but 
simply  as  ugly.  Just  as  we  can  see  nothing  about 
Lord  Shaftesbury  but  his  hat,  they  could  see  nothing 
about  Cromwell  but  his  nose.  There  is  no  doubt 
of  the  shock  and  sharpness  of  the  silent  transition. 
The  only  difference  is  that  accordingly  as  we  think 
of  man  and  his  nature,  according  to  our  deepest 
intuitions  about  things,  we  shall  see  in  the  Restoration 
and  the  Jin  J<?  siecle  philosophy  a  man  waking  from  a 
turbid  and  pompous  dream,  or  a  man  hurled  from 
heaven  and  the  wars  of  the  angels. 

G.  F.  Watts  is  so  deeply  committed  to,  and  so 
unalterably  steeped  in,  this  early  Victorian  seriousness 
and  air  of  dealing  with  great  matters,  that  unless  we 
sharply  apprehend  that  spirit,  and  its  difference  from 
our  own,  we  shall  misunderstand  his  work  from  the 
outset.  Splendid  as  is  the  art  of  Watts  technically 
or  obviously  considered,  we  shall  yet  find  much  in 
it  to  perplex  and  betray  us,  unless  we  understand  his 
original  theory  and  intention,  a  theory  and  intention 
dyed  deeply  with  the  colours  of  a  great  period  which 
is  gone.  The  great  technical  inequalities  of  his  work, 
its  bursts  of  stupendous  simplicity  in  colour  and 
design,  its  daring  failures,  its  strange  symbolical 
portraits,  all  will  mislead  or  bewilder  if  we  have  not 

II 


GEORGE    FREDERICK    WATTS 

the  thread  of  intention.  In  order  to  hold  that, 
we  must  hold  something  which  runs  through 
and  supports,  as  a  string  supports  jewels,  all  the 
wars  and  treaties  and  reforms  of  the  nineteenth 
century. 

There  are  at  least  three  essential  and  preliminary 
points  on  which  Watts  is  so  completely  at  one  with 
the  nineteenth  century  and  so  completely  out  of 
accord  with  the  twentieth,  that  it  may  be  advisable 
to  state  them  briefly  before  we  proceed  to  the  narrower 
but  not  more  cogent  facts  of  his  life  and  growth. 
The  first  of  these  is  a  nineteenth-century  atmosphere 
which  is  so  difficult  to  describe,  that  we  can  only 
convey  it  by  a  sort  of  paradox.  It  is  difficult  to 
know  whether  it  should  be  called  doubt  or  faith. 
For  if,  on  the  one  hand,  real  faith  would  have  been 
more  confident,  real  doubt,  on  the  other  hand,  would 
have  been  more  indifferent.  The  attitude  of  that 
age  of  which  the  middle  and  best  parts  of  Watts' 
work  is  most  typical,  was  an  attitude  of  devouring 
and  concentrated  interest  in  things  which  were,  by 
their  own  system,  impossible  or  unknowable.  Men 
were,  in  the  main,  agnostics  :  they  said,  "  We  do 
not  know  "  ;  but  not  one  of  them  ever  ventured  to 
say,  "  We  do  not  care."  In  most  eras  of  revolt 
and  question,  the  sceptics  reap  something  from  their 
scepticism  :  if  a  man  were  a  believer  in  the  eighteenth 
century,  there  was  Heaven  ;  if  he  were  an  unbeliever, 
there  was  the  Hell-Fire  Club.  But  these  men  re- 
strained themselves  more  than  hermits  for  a  hope 
that  was  more  than  half  hopeless,  and  sacrificed  hope 
itself  for  a  liberty  which  they  would  not  enjoy  ;  they 
were  rebels  without  deliverance  and  saints  without 
reward.  There  may  have  been  and  there  was  some- 
thing arid  and  over-pompous  about  them  :  a  newer 
and  gayer  philosophy  may  be  passing  before  us  and 

12 


GEORGE    FREDERICK   WATTS 

changing  many  things  for  the  better  ;  but  we  shall 
not  easily  see  any  nobler  race  of  men,  and  of  them 
all  most  assuredly  there  was  none  nobler  than  Watts. 
If  anyone  wishes  to  see  that  spirit,  he  will  see  it  in 
pictures  painted  by  Watts  in  a  form  beyond  expression 
sad  and  splendid.  Hope  that  is  dim  and  delicate 
and  yet  immortal,  the  indestructible  minimum  of 
the  spirit ;  Love  and  Death  that  is  awful  and  yet 
the  reverse  of  horrible  ;  The  Court  of  Death  that  is 
like  a  page  of  Epictetus  and  might  have  been  dreamt 
by  a  dead  Stoic  :  these  are  the  visions  of  that  spirit 
and  the  incarnations  of  that  time.  Its  faith  was 
doubtful,  but  its  doubt  was  faithful.  And  its  supreme 
and  acute  difference  from  most  periods  of  scepticism, 
from  the  later  Renaissance,  from  the  Restoration 
and  from  the  'hedonism  of  our  own  time  was  this, 
that  when  the  creeds  crumbled  and  the  gods  seemed 
to  break  up  and  vanish,  it  did  not  fall  back,  as  we 
do,  on  things  yet  more  solid  and  definite,  upon 
art  and  wine  and  high  finance  and  industrial 
efficiency  and  vices.  It  fell  in  love  with  abstrac- 
tions and  became  enamoured  of  great  and  desolate 
words. 

The  second  point  of  rapport  between  Watts  and  his 
time  was  a  more  personal  matter,  a  matter  more 
concerned  with  the  man,  or,  at  least,  the  type  ;  but 
it  throws  so  much  light  upon  almost  every  step  of 
his  career  that  it  may  with  advantage  be  suggested 
here.  Those  who  know  the  man  himself,  the 
quaint  and  courtly  old  man  down  at  Limnerslease, 
know  that  if  he  has  one  trait  more  arresting 
than  another,  it  is  his  almost  absurd  humility.  He 
even  disparages  his  own  talent  that  he  may  insist 
rather  upon  his  aims.  His  speech  and  gesture  are 
simple,  his  manner  polite  to  the  point  of  being  depre- 
cating, his  soul  to  all  appearance  of  an  almost  con- 

13 


GEORGE    FREDERICK    WATTS 

founding  clarity  and  innocence.  But  although  these 
appearances  accurately  represent  the  truth  about 
him,  though  he  is  in  reality  modest  and  even  fan- 
tastically modest,  there  is  another  element  in  him, 
an  element  which  was  in  almost  all  the  great  men  of 
his  time,  and  it  is  something  which  many  in  these 
days  would  call  a  kind  of  splendid  and  inspired  impu- 
dence. It  is  that  wonderful  if  simple  power  of 
preaching,  of  claiming  to  be  heard,  of  believing  in 
an  internal  message  and  destiny  :  it  is  the  audacious 
faculty  of  mounting  a  pulpit.  Those  would  be 
very  greatly  mistaken  who,  misled  by  the  child-like 
and  humble  manner  of  this  monk  of  art,  expected  to 
find  in  him  any  sort  of  doubt,  or  any  sort  of  fear, 
or  any  sort  of  modesty  about  the  aims  he  follows  or 
the  cause  he  loves.  He  has  the  one  great  certainty 
which  marks  off  all  the  great  Victorians  from  those 
who  have  come  after  them  :  he  may  not  be  certain 
that  he  is  successful,  or  certain  that  he  is  great,  or 
certain  that  he  is  good,  or  certain  that  he  is  capable  : 
but  he  is  certain  that  he  is  right.  It  is  of  course 
the  very  element  of  confidence  which  has  in  our 
day  become  least  common  and  least  possible.  We 
know  we  are  brilliant  and  distinguished,  but  we  do 
not  know  we  are  right.  We  swagger  in  fantastic 
artistic  costumes ;  we  praise  ourselves  ;  we  fling 
epigrams  right  and  left  ;  we  have  the  courage  to  play 
the  egoist  and  the  courage  to  play  the  fool,  but  we 
have  not  the  courage  to  preach.  If  we  are  to  deliver 
a  philosophy  it  must  be  in  the  manner  of  the  late 
Mr.  Whistler  and  the  ridentem  dicere  verum.  If  our 
heart  is  to  be  aimed  at  it  must  be  with  the  rapier  of 
Stevenson  which  runs  us  through  without  either 
pain  or  puncture.  It  is  only  just  to  say,  that  good 
elements  as  well  as  bad  ones  have  joined  in  making 
this  old  Victorian  preaching  difficult  or  alien  to  us. 

«4 


LESLIE    STEPHEN. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK    WATTS 

Humility  as  well  as  fear,  camaraderie  as  well  as  cyni- 
cism, a  sense  of  complexity  and  a  kind  of  gay  and 
worldly  charity  have  led  us  to  avoid  the  pose  of  the 
preacher,  to  be  moral  by  ironies,  to  whisper  a  word 
and  glide  away.  But,  whatever  may  be  the  accidental 
advantage  of  this  recoil  from  the  didactic,  it  certainly 
does  mean  some  loss  of  courage  and  of  the  old  and 
athletic  simplicity.  Nay,  in  some  sense  it  is  really  a 
loss  of  a  fine  pride  and  self-regard.  Mr.  Whistler 
coquetted  and  bargained  about  the  position  and  sale 
of  his  pictures  :  he  praised  them  ;  he  set  huge  prices 
on  them  ;  but  still  under  all  disguise,  he  treated  them 
as  trifles.  Watts,  when  scarcely  more  than  a  boy 
and  comparatively  unknown,  started  his  great  custom 
of  offering  his  pictures  as  gifts  worthy  of  a  great  nation. 
Thus  we  came  to  the  conclusion,  a  conclusion  which 
may  seem  to  some  to  contain  a  faint  element  of 
paradox,  that  Mr.  Whistler  suffered  from  an  exces- 
sive and  exaggerated  modesty.  And  this  unnatural 
modesty  of  Mr.  Whistler  can  scarcely  be  more  typically 
symbolized  than  in  his  horror  of  preaching.  The  new 
school  of  art  and  thought  does  indeed  wear  an  air  of 
audacity,  and  breaks  out  everywhere  into  blasphemies,' 
as  if  it  required  any  courage  to  say  a  blasphemy. 
There  is  only  one  thing  that  it  requires  real  courage 
to  say,  and  that  is  a  truism. 

Lastly,  it  would  be  quite  impossible  to  complete 
this  prefatory  suggestion  of  the  atmosphere  in  which 
the  mind  of  Watts  grew  and  prevailed,  without 
saying  something  about  that  weary  and  weather- 
beaten  question  of  the  relation  of  art  to  ethics  on 
which  so  much  has  been  said  in  connexion  with  him 
and  his  contemporaries.  About  the  real  aim  and  the 
real  value  of  Watts'  allegorical  pictures  I  shall  speak 
later,  but  for  the  moment  it  is  only  desirable  to  point 
out  what  the  early  and  middle  Victorian  view  of 

15 


GEORGE    FREDERICK   WATTS 

the  matter  really  was.  According  to  the  later 
aesthetic  creed  which  Mr.  Whistler  and  others  did 
so  much  to  preach,  the  state  of  the  arts  under  the 
reign  of  that  Victorian  view  was  a  chaos  of  every- 
one minding  everyone  else's  business.  It  was  a 
world  in  which  painters  were  trying  to  be  novelists, 
and  novelists  trying  to  be  historians,  and  musicians 
doing  the  work  of  schoolmasters,  and  sculptors  doing 
the  work  of  curates.  That  is  a  view  which  has  some 
truth  in  it,  both  as  a  description  of  the  actual  state  of 
things  and  as  involving  an  interesting  and  suggestive 
philosophy  of  the  arts.  But  a  good  deal  of  harm 
may  be  done  by  ceaselessly  repeating  to  ourselves 
even  a  true  and  fascinating  fashionable  theory,  and  a 
great  deal  of  good  by  endeavouring  to  realize  the  real 
truth  about  an  older  one.  The  thing  from  which 
England  suffers  just  now  more  than  from  any  other 
evil  is  not  the  assertion  of  falsehoods,  but  the  endless 
and  irrepressible  repetition  of  half-truths.  There  is 
another  side  to  every  historic  situation,  and  that 
often  a  startling  one ;  and  the  other  side  of  the 
Victorian  view  of  art,  now  so  out  of  mode,  is  too 
little  considered.  The  salient  and  essential  charac- 
teristic of  Watts  and  men  of  his  school  was  that  they 
regarded  life  as  a  whole.  They  had  in  their  heads,  as 
it  were,  a  synthetic  philosophy  which  put  everything 
into  a  certain  relation  with  God  and  the  wheel  of 
things.  Thus,  psychologically  speaking,  they  were 
incapable  not  merely  of  holding  such  an  opinion, 
but  actually  of  thinking  such  a  thought  as  that  of  art 
for  art's  sake ;  it  was  to  them  like  talking  about 
voting  for  voting's  sake,  or  amputating  for  amputating's 
sake.  To  them  as  to  the  ancient  Jews  the  Spirit  of 
the  unity  of  existence  declared  in  thunder  that 
they  should  not  make  any  graven  image,  or  have  any 
gods  but  Him.  Doubtless,  they  did  not  give  art  a 
16 


WALTER    CRANE. 


GEORGE  FREDERICK  WATTS 

relation  of  unimpeachable  correctness  :  in  their 
scheme  of  things  it  may  be  true,  or  rather  it  is  true, 
that  the  aesthetic  was  confused  with  the  utilitarian, 
that  good  gardens  were  turned  so  to  speak  into  bad 
cornfields,  and  a  valuable  temple  into  a  useless  post- 
office.  But  in  so  far  as  they  had  this  fundamental 
idea  that  art  must  be  linked  to  life,  and  to  the  strength 
and  honour  of  nations,  they  were  a  hundred  times 
more  broad-minded  and  more  right  than  the  new 
ultra-technical  school.  The  idea  of  following  art 
through  everything  for  itself  alone,  through  extrava- 
gance, through  cruelty,  through  morbidity,  is  just 
exactly  as  superstitious  as  the  idea  of  following  theology 
for  itself  alone  through  extravagance  and  cruelty  and 
morbidity.  To  deny  that  Baudelaire  is  loathsome,  or 
Nietzsche  inhuman,  because  we  stand  in  awe  of  beauty, 
is  just  the  same  thing  as  denying  that  the  Court  of 
Pope  Julius  was  loathsome,  or  the  rack  inhuman, 
because  we  stand  in  awe  of  religion.  It  is  not  necessary 
and  it  is  not  honest.  The  young  critics  of  the  Green 
Carnation,  with  their  nuances  and  technical  mysteries, 
would  doubtless  be  surprised  to  learn  that  as  a  class 
they  resemble  ecstatic  nuns,  but  their  principle  is, 
in  reality,  the  same.  There  is  a  great  deal  to  be  said 
for  them,  and  a  great  deal,  for  that  matter,  to  be  said 
for  nuns.  But  there  is  nothing  to  be  surprised  at, 
nothing  to  call  for  any  charge  of  inconsistency  or  lack 
of  enlightenment,  about  the  conduct  of  Watts  and 
the  great  men  of  his  age,  in  being  unable  to  separate 
art  from  ethics.  They  were  nationalists  and  uni- 
versalists  :  they  thought  that  the  ecstatic  isolation 
of  the  religious  sense  had  done  incalculable  harm  to 
religion.  It  is  not  remarkable  or  unreasonable  that 
they  should  think  that  the  ecstatic  isolation  of  the 
artistic  sense  would  do  incalculable  harm  to  art. 

This,    then,    was    the    atmosphere    of    Watts    and 

B  17 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

Victorian  idealism  :  an  atmosphere  so  completely 
vanished  from  the  world  of  art  in  which  we  now  live 
that  the  above  somewhat  long  introduction  is  really 
needed  to  make  it  vivid  or  human  to  us.  These  three 
elements  may  legitimately,  as  I  have  said,  be  predicated 
of  it  as  its  main  characteristics  :  first,  the  sceptical 
idealism,  the  belief  that  abstract  verities  remained  the 
chief  affairs  of  men  when  theology  left  them  ;  second, 
the  didactic  simplicity,  the  claim  to  teach  other  men 
and  to  assume  one's  own  value  and  rectitude  ;  third, 
the  cosmic  utilitarianism,  the  consideration  of  any 
such  thing  as  art  or  philosophy  perpetually  with 
reference  to  a  general  good.  They  may  be  right  or 
wrong,  they  may  be  returning  or  gone  for  ever ; 
theories  and  fashions  may  change  the  face  of  humanity 
again  and  yet  again ;  but  at  least  in  that  one  old  man 
at  Limnerslease,  burned,  and  burned  until  death,  these 
convictions,  like  three  lamps  in  an  old  pagan  temple 
of  stoicism. 

Of  the  ancestry  of  Watts  so  little  is  known  that  it 
resolves  itself  into  one  hypothesis  :  a  hypothesis  which 
brings  with  it  a  suggestion,  a  suggestion  employed 
by  almost  all  his  existing  biographers,  but  a  suggestion 
which  cannot,  I  think,  pass  unchallenged,  although 
the  matter  may  appear  somewhat  theoretic  and 
remote.  .  atts  was  born  in  London,  but  his  family 
had  in  the  previous  generation  come  from  Hereford. 
The  vast  amount  of  \\  elsh  blood  which  is  by  the 
nature  of  the  case  to  be  found  in  Herefordshire  has 
led  to  the  statement  that  Watts  is  racially  a  Celjt, 
which  is  very  probably  true.  But  it  is  also  said,  in 
almost  every  notice  of  his  life  and  work,  that  the 
Celtic  spirit  can  be  detected  in  his  painting,  that  the 
Celtic  principle  of  mysticism  is  a  characteristic  of 
his  artistic  conceptions.  It  is  in  no  idly  antagonistic 
spirit  that  I  venture  to  doubt  this  most  profoundly. 
18 


THE    SLUMBER    OF    THE    AGES 


GEORGE    FREDERICK   WATTS 

Watts  may  or  may  not  be  racially  a  Celt,  but  there  is 
nothing  Celtic  about  his  mysticism.  The  essential 
Celtic  spirit  in  letters  and  art  may,  I  think,  be  defined 
as  a  sense  of  the  unbearable  beauty  of  things.  The 
essential  spirit  of  Watts  may,  I  think,  be  much  better 
expressed  as  a  sense  of  the  joyful  austerity  of  things. 
The  dominant  passion  of  the  artistic  Celt,  of  Mr. 
W.  B.  Yeats  or  Sir  Edward  Burne-Jones,  is  in  the 
word  "  escape  "  :  escape  into  a  land  where  oranges 
grow  on  plum-trees  and  men  can  sow  what  they  like 
and  reap  what  they  enjoy.  To  Watts  the  very  word 
"  escape  "  would  be  horrible,  like  an  obscene  word  : 
his  ideal  is  altogether  duty  and  the  great  wheel. 
To  the  Celt  frivolity  is  most  truly  the  most  serious 
of  things,  since  in  the  tangle  of  roses  is  always  the 
old  serpent  who  is  wiser  than  the  world.  To  Watts 
seriousness  is  most  truly  the  most  "  joyful  of  things," 
since  in  it  we  come  nearest  to  that  ultimate  equili- 
brium and  reconciliation  of  things  whereby  alone 
they  live  and  endure  life  and  each  other.  It  is  difficult 
to  imagine  that  amid  all  the  varieties  of  noble  temper 
and  elemental  desire  there  could  possibly  be  two 
exhibiting  a  more  total  divergence  than  that  between 
a  kindly  severity  and  an  almost  cruel  love  of  sweetness ; 
than  that  between  a  laborious  and  open-air  charity 
and  a  kind  of  Bacchic  asceticism  ;  between  a  joy  in 
peace  and  a  joy  in  disorder ;  between  a  reduction  of 
existence  to  its  simplest  formula  and  an  extension  of 
it  to  its  most  frantic  corollary ;  between  a  lover  of 
justice  who  accepts  the  real  world  more  submissively 
than  a  slave  and  a  lover  of  pleasure  who  despises 
the  real  world  more  bitterly  than  a  hermit ;  between 
a  king  in  battle-harness  and  a  vagabond  in  elf-land ; 
between  Watts  and  Sir  Edward  Burne-Jones. 

It  is  remarkable  that  even  the  technical  style  of 
Watts   gives   a   contradiction   to   this   Celtic   theory. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

Watts  is  strong  precisely  where  the  Celt  is  weak,  and 
weak  precisely  where  the  Celt  is  strong.  The  only 
thing  that  the  Celt  has  lacked  in  art  is  that  hard 
mass,  that  naked  outline,  that  apxireKroviK^,  which 
makes  Watts  a  sort  of  sculptor  of  draughtsmanship. 
It  is  as  well  for  us  that  the  Celt  has  not  had  this  :  if 
he  had,  he  would  rule  the  world  with  a  rod  of  iron  ; 
for  he  has  everything  else.  There  are  no  hard  black 
lines  in  Burke's  orations,  or  Tom  Moore's  songs,  or  the 
plays  of  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats.  Burke  is  the  greatest  of 
political  philosophers,  because  in  him  only  are  there 
distances  and  perspectives,  as  there  are  on  the  real 
earth,  with  its  mists  of  morning  and  evening,  and  its 
blue  horizons  and  broken  skies.  Moore's  songs  have 
neither  a  pure  style  nor  deep  realization,  nor  origi- 
nality of  form,  nor  thought  nor  wit  nor  vigour,  but 
they  have  something  else  which  is  none  of  these  things, 
which  is  nameless  and  the  one  thing  needful.  In  Mr. 
Yeats'  plays  there  is  only  one  character  :  the  hero 
who  rules  and  kills  all  the  others,  and  his  name  is 
Atmosphere.  Atmosphere  and  the  gleaming  distances 
are  the  soul  of  Celtic  greatness  as  they  were  of  Burne- 
Jones,  who  was,  as  I  have  said,  weak  precisely  where 
Watts  is  strong,  in  the  statuesque  quality  in  drawing, 
in  the  love  of  heavy  hands  like  those  of  Mammon, 
of  a  strong  back  like  that  of  Eve  Repentant,  in  a  single 
fearless  and  austere  outline  like  that  of  the  angel  in 
'The  Court  of  Death,  in  the  frame-filling  violence  of 
Jonah,  in  the  half-witted  brutality  of  The  Minotaur. 
He  is  deficient,  that  is  to  say,  in  what  can  only  be  called 
the  god-like  materialism  of  art.  Watts,  on  the  other 
hand,  is  peculiarly  strong  in  it.  Idealist  as  he  is, 
there  is  nothing  frail  or  phantasmal  about  the  things 
or  the  figures  he  loves.  Though  not  himself  a  robust 
man,  he  loves  robustness  ;  he  loves  a  great  bulk  of 
shoulder,  an  abrupt  bend  of  neck,  a  gigantic  stride, 

20 


CARDINAL    MANNING. 


GEORGE    FREDERICK   WATTS 

a  large  and  swinging  limb,  a  breast  bound  as  with 
bands  of  brass.  Of  course  the  deficiency  in  such  a 
case  is  very  far  from  being  altogether  on  one  side. 
There  are  abysses  in  Burne- Jones  which  Watts  could 
not  understand,  the  Celtic  madness,  older  than  any 
sanity,  the  hunger  that  will  remain  after  the  longest 
feast,  the  sorrow  that  is  built  up  of  stratified  delights. 
From  the  point  of  view  of  the  true  Celt,  Watts,  the 
Watts  who  painted  the  great  stoical  pictures  Love 
and  Death,  Time,  Death  and  Judgment,  The  Court  of 
Death,  Mammon,  and  Cain,  this  pictorial  Watts  would 
probably  be,  must  almost  certainly  be,  simply  a  sad, 
sane,  strong,  stupid  Englishman.  He  may  or  may 
not  be  Welsh  by  extraction  or  by  part  of  his  extraction, 
but  in  spirit  he  is  an  Englishman,  with  all  the  faults 
and  all  the  disadvantages  of  an  Englishman.  He  is  a 
great  Englishman  like  Milton  or  Gladstone,  of  the 
type,  that  is  to  say,  that  were  too  much  alive  for 
anything  but  gravity,  and  who  enjoyed  themselves 
far  too  much  to  trouble  to  enjoy  a  joke.  Matthew 
Arnold  has  come  near  to  defining  that  kind  of  idealism, 
so  utterly  different  from  the  Celtic  kind,  which  is  to  be 
found  in  Milton  and  again  in  Watts.  He  has  called 
it,  in  one  of  his  finest  and  most  accurate  phrases,  "  the 
imaginative  reason." 

This  racial  legend  about  the  Watts  family  does  not 
seem  to  rest  upon  any  certain  foundations,  and  as 
I  have  said,  the  deduction  drawn  from  it  is  quite 
loose  and  misleading.  The  whole  is  only  another 
example  of  that  unfortunate,  if  not  infamous,  modern 
habit  of  talking  about  such  things  as  heredity  with 
a  vague  notion  that  science  has  closed  the  question 
when  she  has  only  just  opened  it.  Nobody  knows, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  whether  a  Celtic  mysticism  can  be 
inherited  any  more  than  a  theory  on  the  Education 
Bill.  But  the  eagerness  of  the  popular  mind  to  snatch 

21 


GEORGE   FREDERICK    WATTS 

at  a  certainty  is  too  impatient  for  the  tardy  processes 
of  real  hypothesis  and  research.  Long  before  heredity 
has  become  a  science,  it  has  become  a  superstition. 
And  this  curious  though  incidental  case  of  the 
origin  of  the  Watts  genius  is  just  one  of  those  cases 
which  make  us  wonder  what  has  been  the  real  result 
of  the  great  rise  of  science.  So  far  the  result  would 
painfully  appear  to  be  that  whereas  men  in  the  earlier 
times  said  unscientific  things  with  the  vagueness  of 
gossip  and  legend,  they  now  say  unscientific  things 
with  the  plainness  and  the  certainty  of  science. 

The  actual  artistic  education  of  Watts,  though 
thorough  indeed  in  its  way,  had  a  somewhat  peculiar 
character,  the  air  of  something  detached  and  private, 
and  to  the  external  eye  something  even  at  random. 
He  works  hard,  but  in  an  elusive  and  personal  manner. 
He  does  not  remember  the  time  when  he  did  not 
draw  :  he  was  an  artist  in  his  babyhood  as  he  is  an 
artist  still  in  his  old  age.  Like  Ruskin  and  many  other 
of  the  great  and  serious  men  of  the  century,  he  would 
seem  to  have  been  brought  up  chiefly  on  what  may  be 
called  the  large  legendary  literature,  on  such  as  Homer 
and  Scott.  Among  his  earliest  recorded  works  was 
a  set  of  coloured  illustrations  to  the  Waverley  Novels, 
and  a  sketch  of  the  struggle  for  the  body  of  Patroclus. 
He  went  to  the  Academy  schools,  but  only  stayed 
there  about  a  month ;  never  caring  for  or  absorbing 
the  teaching,  such  as  it  was,  of  the  place.  He  wan- 
dered perpetually  in  the  Greek  galleries  of  the  British 
Museum,  staring  at  the  Elgin  marbles,  from  which 
he  always  declared  he  learnt  all  the  art  he  knew. 
"  There,"  he  said,  stretching  out  his  hand  towards 
the  Ilyssus  in  his  studio,  "  there  is  my  master." 
We  hear  of  a  friendship  between  him  and  the  sculptor 
William  Behnes,  of  Watts  lounging  about  that  artist's 
studio,  playing  with  clay,  modelling  busts,  and  staring 
'22 


C/J 

O 

< 

X 

(J 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

at  the  work  of  sculpture.  His  eyes  seemed  to  have 
been  at  this  time  the  largest  and  hungriest  part  of 
him.  Even  when  the  great  chance  and  first  triumph 
of  his  life  arrived  a  year  or  two  later,  even  when  he 
gained  the  great  scholarship  which  sent  him  abroad 
to  work  amid  the  marbles  of  Italy,  when  a  famous 
ambassador  was  his  patron  and  a  brilliant  circle  his 
encouragement,  we  do  not  find  anything  of  the 
conventional  student  about  him.  He  never  painted 
in  the  galleries ;  he  only  dreamed  in  them.  This 
must  not,  of  course,  be  held  to  mean  that  he  did 
not  work ;  though  one  or  two  people  who  have 
written  memoirs  of  Watts  have  used  a  phraseology, 
probably  without  noticing  it,  which  might  be  held 
to  imply  this.  Not  only  is  the  thing  ludicrously 
incongruous  with  his  exact  character  and  morals ; 
but  anyone  who  knows  anything  whatever  about  the 
nature  of  pictorial  art  will  know  quite  well  that  a 
man  could  not  paint  like  that  without  having  worked  ; 
just  as  he  would  know  that  a  man  could  not  be  the 
Living  Serpent  without  any  previous  practice  with 
his  joints.  To  say  that  he  could  really  learn  to  paint 
and  draw  with  the  technical  merit  of  V\  atts,  or  with 
any  technical  merit  at  all,  by  simply  looking  at  other 
people's  pictures  and  statues  will  seem  to  anyone, 
with  a  small  technical  sense,  like  saying  that  a  man 
learnt  to  be  a  sublime  violinist  by  staring  at  fiddles  in 
a  shop  window.  It  is  as  near  a  physical  impossibility 
as  can  exist  in  these  matters.  Work  Watts  must 
have  done  and  did  do ;  it  is  the  only  conclusion 
possible  which  is  consistent  either  with  the  nature 
of  Watts  or  the  nature  of  painting ;  and  it  is  fully 
supported  by  the  facts.  But  what  the  facts  do  reveal 
is  that  he  worked  in  this  curiously  individual,  this 
curiously  invisible  way.  He  had  his  own  notion 
of  when  to  dream  and  when  to  draw ;  as  he  shrank 

23 


GEORGE    FREDERICK   WATTS 

from  no  toil,  so  he  shrank  from  no  idleness.  He  was 
something  which  is  one  of  the  most  powerful  and 
successful  things  in  the  world,  something  which  is  far 
more  powerful  and  successful  than  a  legion  of  students 
and  prizemen :  he  was  a  serious  and  industrious 
truant. 

It  is  worth  while  to  note  this  in  his  boyhood, 
partly,  of  course,  because  from  one  end  of  his  life  to 
the  other  there  is  this  queer  note  of  loneliness  and 
liberty.  But  it  is  also  more  immediately  and  prac- 
tically important  because  it  throws  some  light  on  the 
development  and  character  of  his  art,  and  even 
especially  of  his  technique.  The  great  singularity 
of  Watts,  considered  as  a  mere  artist,  is  that  he  stands 
alone.  He  is  not  connected  with  any  of  the  groups 
of  the  nineteenth  century  :  he  has  neither  followed  a 
school  nor  founded  one.  He  is  not  mediaeval ;  but 
no  one  could  exactly  call  him  classical :  we  have  only 
to  compare  him  to  Leighton  to  feel  the  difference  at 
once.  His  artistic  style  is  rather  a  thing  more  primi- 
tive than  paganism ;  a  thing  to  which  paganism 
and  mediaevalism  are  alike  upstart  sects  ;  a  style  of 
painting  there  might  have  been  upon  the  tower  of 
Babel.  He  is  mystical ;  but  he  is  not  mediaeval : 
we  have  only  to  compare  him  to  Rossetti  to  feel  the 
difference.  When  he  emerged  into  the  artistic  world, 
that  world  was  occupied  by  the  pompous  and  his- 
torical school,  that  school  which  was  so  exquisitely 
caricatured  by  Thackeray  in  Gandish  and  his 
"  Boadishia " ;  but  Watts  was  not  pompous  or 
historical :  he  painted  one  historical  picture,  which 
brought  him  a  youthful  success,  and  he  has  scarcely 
painted  another.  He  lived  on  through  the  great 
Pre-Raphaelite  time,  that  very  noble  and  very  much 
undervalued  time,  when  men  found  again  what  had 
been  hidden  since  the  thirteenth  century  under  loads 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

of  idle  civilization,  the  truth  that  simplicity  and  a 
monastic  laboriousness  is  the  happiest  of  all  things ; 
the  great  truth  that  purity  is  the  only  atmosphere 
for  passion  ;  the  great  truth  that  silver  is  more  beautiful 
than  gold.  But  though  there  is  any  quantity  of  this 
sentiment  in  Watts  himself,  Watts  never  has  been  a 
Pre-Raphaelite.  He  has  seen  other  fashions  come 
and  go  ;  he  has  seen  the  Pre-Raphaelites  overwhelmed 
by  a  heavy  restoration  of  the  conventional,  headed 
by  Millais  with  his  Scotch  moors  and  his  English 
countesses ;  but  he  has  not  heeded  it.  He  has  seen 
these  again  overturned  by  the  wild  lancers  of  Whistler  ; 
he  has  seen  the  mists  of  Impressionism  settle  down 
over  the  world,  making  it  weird  and  delicate  and  non- 
committal :  but  he  thinks  no  more  of  the  wet  mist 
of  the  Impressionist  than  he  thought  of  the  dry  glare 
of  the  Pre-Raphaelite. 

He,  the  most  mild  of  men,  has  yet  never  been 
anything  but  Watts.  He  has  followed  the  gleam, 
like  some  odd  modern  Merlin.  He  has  escaped  all 
the  great  atmospheres,  the  divine  if  deluding  intoxi- 
cations, which  have  whirled  one  man  one  way  and 
one  another  ;  which  flew  to  the  head  of  a  perfect 
stylist  like  Ruskin  and  made  him  an  insane  scientist ; 
which  flew  to  the  head  of  a  great  artist  like  Whistler 
and  made  him  a  pessimistic  dandy.  He  has  passed 
them  with  a  curious  immunity,  an  immunity  which, 
if  it  were  not  so  nakedly  innocent,  might  almost  be 
called  egotism  ;  but  which  is  in  fact  rather  the  single 
eye.  He  said  once  that  he  had  not  even  consented 
to  illustrate  a  book ;  his  limitation  was  that  he  could 
express  no  ideas  but  his  own.  He  admired  Tennyson  ; 
he  thought  him  the  greatest  of  poets ;  he  thought 
him  a  far  greater  man  than  himself ;  he  read  him,  he 
adored  him,  but  he  could  not  illustrate  him.  This 
is  the  curious  secret  strength  which  kept  him  inde- 

25 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

pendent  in  his  youth  and  kept  him  independent 
through  the  great  roaring  triumph  of  the  Pre- 
Raphaelite  and  the  great  roaring  triumph  of  the 
Impressionist.  He  stands  in  the  world  of  art  as  he 
stood  in  the  studio  of  Behnes  and  in  the  Uffizi  Gallery. 
He  stands  gazing,  but  not  copying. 

Of  Watts  as  he  was  at  this  time  there  remains  a 
very  interesting  portrait  painted  by  himself.  It 
represents  him  at  the  age  of  nineteen,  a  dark,  slim, 
and  very  boyish-looking  creature.  Something  in 
changed  conditions  may  no  doubt  account  for  the 
flowing  and  voluminous  dark  hair  :  we  see  such  a 
mane  in  many  of  the  portraits  of  the  most  distin- 
guished men  of  that  time  ;  but  if  a  man  appeared 
now  and  walked  down  Fleet  Street  with  so  neglected 
a  hure,  he  would  be  mistaken  for  an  advertisement 
of  a  hair-dresser,  or  by  the  more  malicious  for  a 
minor  poet.  But  there  is  about  this  picture  not  a 
trace  of  affectation  or  the  artistic  immunity  in  these 
matters  :  the  boy's  dress  is  rough  and  ordinary, 
his  expression  is  simple  and  unconscious.  From  a 
modern  standpoint  we  should  say  without  hesitation 
that  if  his  hair  is  long  it  is  because  he  has  forgotten 
to  have  it  cut.  And  there  is  something  about  this 
contrast  between  the  unconsciously  leonine  hair 
and  the  innocent  and  almost  bashful  face,  there  is 
something  like  a  parable  of  Watts.  His  air  is  artistic, 
if  you  will.  His  famous  skull  cap,  which  makes  him 
look  like  a  Venetian  senator,  is  as  pictorial  and  effective 
as  the  boyish  mane  in  the  picture.  But  he  belongs 
to  that  older  race  of  Bohemians,  of  which  even 
Thackeray  only  saw  the  sunset,  the  great  old  race  of 
art  and  literature  who  were  ragged  because  they 
were  really  poor,  frank  because  they  were  really  free, 
and  untidy  because  they  were  really  forgetful.  It  will 
not  do  to  confuse  Watts  with  these  men  ;  there  is 
26 


"FOR     HE    HAD    GREAT    POSSESSIONS." 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

much  about  him  that  is  precise  and  courtly,  and 
which,  as  I  shall  have  occasion  to  remark,  belongs 
really  to  a  yet  older  period.  But  it  is  more  right  to 
reckon  Watts  along  with  them  in  their  genuine 
raggedness  than  to  suppose  that  the  unquestionable 
pictures  queness  with  which  he  fronts  the  world  has 
any  relation  with  that  new  Bohemianism  which  is 
untidy  because  it  is  conventional,  frank  because  it 
follows  a  fashion,  careless  because  it  watches  for  all 
its  effects,  and  ragged  and  coarse  in  its  tastes  because 
it  has  too  much  money. 

The  first  definite  encouragement,  or  at  least  the 
first  encouragement  now  ascertainable,  probably  came 
to  the  painter  from  that  interesting  Greek  amateur, 
Mr.  Constantine  lonides.  It  was  under  his  encourage- 
ment that  Watts  began  all  his  earlier  work  of  the  more 
ambitious  kind,  and  it  was  the  portrait  of  Mrs.  Con- 
stantine lonides  which  ranks  among  the  earliest  of  his 
definite  successes.  He  achieved  immediate  profes- 
sional success,  however,  at  an  astonishingly  early  age, 
judged  by  modern  standards.  When  he  was  barely 
twenty  he  had  three  pictures  in  the  Royal  Academy : 
the  first  two  were  portraits,  and  the  third  a  picture 
called  The  Wounded,  Heron.  There  is  always  a  very 
considerable  temptation  to  fantasticality  in  dealing 
with  these  artistic  origins  :  no  doubt  it  does  not 
always  follow  that  a  man  is  destined  to  be  a  military 
conqueror  because  he  beats  other  little  boys  at  school, 
nor  endued  with  a  passionate  and  clamorous  nature 
because  he  begins  this  mortal  life  with  a  yell.  But 
Watts  has,  to  a  rather  unusual  degree,  a  sincere  and 
consistent  and  homogeneous  nature  ;  and  this  first 
exhibit  of  his  has  really  a  certain  amount  of  symbolism 
about  it.  Portraiture,  with  which  he  thus  began,  he 
was  destined  to  raise  to  a  level  never  before  attained 
in  English  art,  so  far  as  significance  and  humanity 

27 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

are  concerned ;  and  there  is  really  something  a  little 
fascinating  about  the  fact  that  along  with  these  pictures 
went  one  picture  which  had,  for  all  practical  purposes, 
an  avowedly  humanitarian  object.  The  picture  of 
The  Wounded  Heron  scarcely  ever  attracts  attention, 
I  imagine,  in  these  days,  but  it  may,  of  course,  have 
been  recalled  for  a  moment  to  the  popular  mind 
by  that  curious  incident  which  occurred  in  connexion 
with  it  and  which  has  often  been  told.  Long  after 
the  painter  who  produced  that  picture  in  his  struggling 
boyhood  had  lost  sight  of  it  and  in  all  probability  for- 
gotten all  about  its  existence,  a  chance  traveller  with 
a  taste  in  the  arts  happened  to  find  it  in  the  dusty 
curiosity-shop  of  a  north-country  town.  He  bought 
it  and  gave  it  back  to  the  now  celebrated  painter, 
who  hung  it  among  the  exhibits  at  Little  Holland 
House.  It  is,  as  I  have  said,  a  thing  painted  clearly 
with  a  humanitarian  object  :  it  depicts  the  suffering  of 
a  stricken  creature  ;  it  depicts  the  helplessness  of  life 
under  the  cruelty  of  the  inanimate  violence ;  it 
depicts  the  pathos  of  dying  and  the  greater  pathos 
of  living.  Since  then,  no  doubt,  Watts  has  improved 
his  machinery  of  presentation  and  found  larger  and 
more  awful  things  to  tell  his  tale  with  than  a  bleeding 
bird.  The  wings  of  the  heron  have  widened  till 
they  embrace  the  world  with  the  terrible  wings  of 
Time  or  Death  :  he  has  summoned  the  stars  to  help 
him  and  sent  the  angels  as  his  ambassadors.  He  has 
changed  the  plan  of  operations  until  it  includes  Heaven 
and  Tartarus.  He  has  never  changed  the  theme. 

The  relations  of  Watts  to  Constantine  lonides 
either  arose  or  became  important  about  this  time. 
The  painter's  fortunes  rose  quickly  and  steadily, 
so  far  as  the  Academy  was  concerned.  He  continued 
to  exhibit  with  a  fair  amount  of  regularity,  chiefly  in 
the  form  of  subjects  from  the  great  romantic  or 
28 


AN     IDLE    CHILD    OF    FANCY. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

historic  traditions  which  were  then  the  whole  pabulum 
of  the  young  idealistic  artist.  In  the  Academy  of 
1840  came  a  picture  on  the  old  romantic  subject  of 
Ferdinand  and  Isabella  ;  in  the  following  year  but 
one,  a  picture  on  the  old  romantic  subject  of  Cymbe- 
line.  The  portrait  of  Mrs.  Constantine  lonides 
appeared  in  1842. 

But  Watts'  mode  of  thought  from  the  very  begin- 
ning had  very  little  kinship  with  the  Academy  and  very 
little  kinship  with  this  kind  of  private  and  conventional 
art.  An  event  was  shortly  to  occur,  the  first  success 
of  his  life,  but  an  event  far  less  important  when  con- 
sidered as  the  first  success  of  his  life  than  it  is  when 
considered  as  an  essential  characteristic  of  his  mind. 
The  circumstances  are  so  extremely  characteristic  of 
something  in  the  whole  spirit  of  the  man's  art  that 
it  may  be  permissible  to  dwell  at  length  on  the  sig- 
nificance of  the  fact  rather  than  on  the  fact  itself. 

The  great  English  Parliament,  the  Senate  that 
broke  the  English  kings,  had  just  moved  its  centre  of 
existence.  The  new  Houses  of  Parliament  had  opened 
with  what  seemed  to  the  men  of  that  time  an  opening 
world.  A  competition  was  started  for  the  decoration 
of  the  halls,  and  Watts  suddenly  sprang  into  impor- 
tance :  he  won  the  great  prize.  The  cartoon  of 
Caractacus  led  in  triumph  through  the  streets  of  Rome 
was  accepted  from  this  almost  nameless  man  by  the 
great  central  power  of  English  history.  And  until 
we  have  understood  that  fact  we  have  not  under- 
stood Watts :  it  was  (one  may  be  permitted  to  fancy) 
the  supreme  hour  of  his  life.  For  Watts'  nature  is 
essentially  public — that  is  to  say,  it  is  modest  and 
noble,  and  has  nothing  to  hide.  His  art  is  an  out- 
door art,  like  that  of  the  healthy  ages  of  the  world, 
like  the  statuesque  art  of  Greece,  like  the  ecclesiastical 
and  external  Gothic  art  of  Christianity  :  an  art  that 

29 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

can  look  the  sun  in  the  face.  He  ought  to  be  em- 
ployed to  paint  factory  chimneys  and  railway 
stations.  I  know  that  this  will  sound  like  an  inso- 
lence :  my  only  answer  is  that  he,  in  accordance 
with  this  great  conception  of  his,  actually  offered  to 
paint  a  railway  station.  With  a  splendid  and  truly 
religious  imagination,  he  asked  permission  to  decorate 
Euston.  The  railway  managers  (not  perceiving,  in 
their  dull  classical  routine,  the  wild  poetry  of  their 
own  station)  declined.  But  until  we  have  understood 
this  immense  notion  of  publicity  in  the  soul  of  Watts, 
we  have  understood  nothing.  The  fundamental 
modern  fallacy  is  that  the  public  life  must  be  an  arti- 
ficial life.  It  is  like  saying  that  the  public  street 
must  be  an  artificial  air.  Men  like  Watts,  men  like 
all  the  great  heroes,  only  breathe  in  public.  WTiat  is 
the  use  of  abusing  a  man  for  publicity  when  he  utters 
in  public  the  true  and  the  enduring  things  ?  What  is 
the  use,  above  all,  of  prying  into  his  secrecy  when  he 
has  cried  his  best  from  the  house-tops  ? 

This  is  the  real  argument  which  makes  a  detailed 
biography  of  Watts  unnecessary  for  all  practical 
purposes.  It  is  in  vain  to  climb  walls  and  hide  in 
cupboards  in  order  to  show  whether  Watts  eats  mus- 
tard or  pepper  with  his  curry  or  whether  Watts  takes 
sugar  or  salt  with  his  porridge.  These  things  may  or 
may  not  become  public  :  it  matters  little.  The 
innermost  that  the  biographer  could  at  last  discover, 
after  all  possible  creepings  and  capers,  would  be  what 
Watts  in  his  inmost  soul  believes,  and  that  Watts 
has  splashed  on  twenty  feet  of  canvas  and  given  to 
the  nation  for  nothing.  Like  one  of  the  great  orators 
of  the  eighteenth  century,  his  public  virtues,  his 
public  ecstasies  are  far  more  really  significant  than 
his  private  weaknesses.  The  rest  of  his  life  is  so 
simple  that  it  is  scarcely  worth  telling.  He  went 
3° 


GEORGE   FREDERICK    WATTS 

with  the  great  scholarship  he  gained  with  his  Caractacus 
to  Italy.  There  he  found  a  new  patron — the  famous 
Lord  Holland,  with  the  whole  of  whose  great  literary 
circle  he  rapidly  became  acquainted.  He  painted 
many  of  his  most  famous  portraits  in  connexion  with 
this  circle,  both  in  Italy  and  afterwards  in  Paris.  But 
this  great  vision  of  the  public  idea  had  entered  his 
blood.  He  offered  his  cartoons  to  Euston  Station ; 
he  painted  St.  George  and  the  Dragon  for  the  House 
of  Lords ;  he  presented  a  fresco  to  the  great  hall 
at  Lincoln's  Inn.  Of  his  life  there  is  scarcely  more 
to  say,  except  the  splendid  fact  that  he  three  times 
refused  a  title.  Of  his  character  there  is  a  great  deal 
more  to  say. 

There  is  unquestionably  about  the  personal  attitude 
of  Watts  something  that  in  the  vague  phraseology 
of  modern  times  would  be  called  Puritan.  Puritan, 
however,  is  very  far  from  being  really  the  right  word. 
The  right  word  is  a  word  which  has  been  singularly 
little  used  in  English  nomenclature  because  historical 
circumstances  have  separated  us  from  the  origin 
from  which  it  sprang.  The  right  word  for  the  spirit 
of  Watts  is  Stoicism.  Watts  is  at  one  with  the  Puritans 
in  the  actual  objects  of  his  attack.  One  of  his  deepest 
and  most  enduring  troubles,  a  matter  of  which  he 
speaks  and  writes  frequently,  is  the  prevalence  of 
gambling.  With  the  realism  of  an  enthusiast,  he 
has  detected  the  essential  fact  that  the  problem  of 
gambling  is  even  more  of  a  problem  in  the  case  of  the 
poorer  classes  than  in  the  case  of  the  richer.  It  is, 
as  he  asserts,  a  far  worse  danger  than  drink.  There 
are  many  other  instances  of  his  political  identity 
with  Puritanism.  He  told  Mr.  W.  T.  Stead  that 
he  had  defended  and  was  prepared  to  defend  the 
staggering  publications  of  the  "  Maiden  Tribute  "  ; 
it  was  the  only  way,  he  said,  to  stem  the  evil.  A 

31 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

picturesque  irradiation  asserts  indeed  that  it  was  under 
the  glow  of  Hebraic  anger  against  these  Babylonian 
cruelties  of  Piccadilly  and  the  Strand  that  he  painted 
as  a  symbol  of  those  cruelties  that  brutal  and  mag- 
nificent picture  The  Minotaur.  The  pictures  them- 
selves of  course  bear  sufficient  attestation  to  this 
general  character  :  Mammon  is  what  we  call  a  Puritan 
picture,  and  Jonah,  and  Fata  Morgana,  and  For  he  had 
Great  Possessions.  It  is  not  difficult  to  see  that 
Watts  has  the  Puritan  vigilance,  the  Puritan  realism, 
and  the  Puritan  severity  in  his  attitude  towards 
public  affairs.  Nevertheless,  as  I  have  said,  he  is  to 
be  described  rather  as  a  Stoic  than  a  Puritan.  The 
essential  difference  between  Christian  and  Pagan 
asceticism  lies  in  the  fact  that  Paganism  in  renouncing 
pleasure  gives  up  something  which  it  does  not  think 
desirable  ;  whereas  Christianity  in  giving  up  pleasure 
gives  up  something  which  it  thinks  very  desirable 
indeed.  Thus  there  is  a  frenzy  in  Christian  asceticism  ; 
its  follies  and  renunciations  are  like  those  of  first  love. 
There  is  a  passion,  and  as  it  were  a  regret,  in  the 
Puritanism  of  Bunyan ;  there  is  none  in  the  Puri- 
tanism of  Watts.  He  is  not  Bunyan,  he  is  Cato. 
The  difference  may  be  a  difficult  one  to  convey, 
but  it  is  one  that  must  not  be  ignored  or  great  mis- 
understandings will  follow.  The  one  self-abnegation 
is  more  reasonable  but  less  joyful.  The  Stoic  casts 
away  pleasure  like  the  parings  of  his  nails ;  the  Mystic 
cuts  it  off  like  his  right  hand  that  offends  him.  In 
Watts  we  have  the  noble  self-abnegation  of  a  noble 
type  and  school ;  but  everything,  however  noble, 
that  has  shape  has  limitation,  and  we  must  not  look 
in  Watts,  with  his  national  self-mastery,  either  for 
the  nightmare  of  Stylites  or  the  gaiety  of  Francis  of 
Assisi. 

It  has  already  been  remarked  that  the  chief  note 
32 


THE    MINOTAUR. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

of  the  painter's  character  is  a  certain  mixture  of 
personal  delicacy  and  self-effacement  with  the  most 
immense  and  audacious  aims.  But  it  is  so  essential 
a  trait  that  it  will  bear  a  repetition  and  the  intro- 
duction of  a  curious  example  of  it.  Watts  in  his 
quaint  and  even  shy  manner  of  speech  often  let 
fall  in  conversation  words  which  hint  at  a  certain 
principle  or  practice  of  his,  a  principle  and  practice 
which  are,  when  properly  apprehended,  beyond 
expression  impressive  and  daring.  The  spectator 
who  studies  his  allegorical  paintings  one  after  another 
will  be  vaguely  impressed  with  something  uniquely 
absent,  something  which  is  usual  and  familiar  in  such 
pictures  conspicuous  by  its  withdrawal ;  a  blank  or 
difference  which  makes  them  things  sundered  alto- 
gether from  the  millions  of  allegorical  pictures  that 
throng  the  great  and  small  galleries  of  painting.  At 
length  the  nature  of  this  missing  thing  may  suddenly 
strike  him  :  in  the  whole  range  of  Watts'  symbolic 
art  there  is  scarcely  a  single  example  of  the  ordinary 
and  arbitrary  current  symbol,  the  ecclesiastical  symbol, 
the  heraldic  symbol,  the  national  symbol.  A  primeval 
vagueness  and  archaism  hang  over  all  the  canvases 
and  cartoons,  like  frescoes  from  some  prehistoric 
temple.  There  is  nothing  there  but  the  eternal 
things,  clay  and  fire  and  the  sea,  and  motherhood 
and  the  dead.  We  cannot  imagine  the  rose  or  the 
lion  of  England  ;  the  keys  or  the  tiara  of  Rome  ;  the 
red  cap  of  Liberty  or  the  crescent  of  Islam  in  a  picture 
by  Watts ;  we  cannot  imagine  the  Cross  itself.  And  in- 
light  and  broken  phrases,  carelessly  and  humbly  ex- 
pressed, as  I  have  said,  the  painter  has  admitted  that 
this  great  omission  was  observed  on  principle.  Its 
object  is  that  the  pictures  may  be  intelligible  if  they 
survive  the  whole  modern  order.  Its  object  is,  that 
is  to  say,  that  if  some  savage  in  a  dim  futurity  dug 

c  33 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

up  one  of  these  dark  designs  on  a  lonely  mountain, 
though  he  worshipped  strange  gods  and  served  laws 
yet  unwritten,  it  might  strike  the  same  message  to 
his  soul  that  it  strikes  upon  clerks  and  navvies  from 
the  walls  of  the  Tate  Gallery.  It  is  impossible  not  to 
feel  a  movement  of  admiration  for  the  magnitude  of 
the  thought.  Here  is  a  man  whose  self-depreciation 
is  internal  and  vital ;  whose  life  is  cloistered,  whose 
character  is  childlike,  and  he  has  yet  within  such  an 
unconscious  and  colossal  sense  of  greatness  that  he 
paints  on  the  assumption  that  his  work  may  outlast 
the  cross  of  the  Eternal  City.  As  a  boy  he  scarcely 
expected  worldly  success :  as  an  old  man  he  still  said 
that  his  worldly  success  had  astonished  him.  But  in 
his  nameless  youth  and  in  his  silent  old  age  he  paints 
like  one  upon  a  tower  looking  down  the  appalling  per- 
spective of  the  centuries  towards  fantastic  temples 
and  inconceivable  republics. 

This  union  of  small  self-esteem  with  a  vast  ambition 
is  a  paradox  in  the  very  soul  of  the  painter ;  and  when 
we  look  at  the  symbolic  pictures  in  the  light  of  this 
theory  of  his,  it  is  interesting  and  typical  to  observe 
how  consistently  he  pursues  any  intellectual  rule 
that  he  laid  down  for  himself.  An  aesthetic  or 
ethical  notion  of  this  kind  is  not  to  him,  as  to  most 
men  with  the  artistic  temperament,  a  thing  to  talk 
about  sumptuously,  to  develop  in  lectures,  and  to 
observe  when  it  happens  to  be  suitable.  It  is  a  thing 
like  his  early  rising  or  his  personal  conscience,  a  thing 
which  is  either  a  rule  or  nothing.  And  we  find  this 
insistence  on  universal  symbols,  this  rejection  of  all 
symbols  that  are  local  or  temporary  or  topical,  even 
if  the  locality  be  a  whole  continent,  the  time  a  stretch 
of  centuries,  or  the  topic  a  vast  civilization  or  an 
undying  church — we  find  this  insistence  looking  out 
very  clearly  from  the  allegories  of  Watts.  It  would 

34 


THE    COURT    OF    DEATH. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

have  been  easy  and  effective,  as  he  himself  often 
said,  to  make  the  meaning  of  a  picture  clear  by  the 
introduction  of  some  popular  and  immediate  image  : 
and  it  must  constantly  be  remembered  that  Watts 
does  care  very  much  for  making  the  meaning  of  his 
pictures  clear.  His  work  indeed  has,  as  I  shall  suggest 
shortly,  a  far  more  subtle  and  unnamable  quality 
than  the  merely  hard  and  didactic  ;  but  it  must  not 
be  for  one  moment  pretended  that  Watts  does  not 
claim  to  teach :  to  do  so  would  be  to  falsify  the  man's 
life.  And  it  would  be  easy,  as  is  quite  obvious,  to 
make  the  pictures  clearer  :  to  hang  a  crucifix  over 
the  Happy  Warrior,  to  give  Mammon  some  imperial 
crown  or  typical  heraldic  symbols,  to  give  a  theo- 
logical machinery  to  The  Court  of  Death.  But  this 
is  put  on  one  side  like  a  temptation  of  the  flesh, 
because  it  conflicts  with  this  stupendous  idea  of 
painting  for  all  peoples  and  all  centuries.  I  am  not 
saying  that  this  extraordinary  ambition  is  necessarily 
the  right  view  of  art,  or  the  right  view  of  life.  I  am 
only  reiterating  it  as  an  absolute  trait  of  men  of  the 
time  and  type  and  temper  of  Watts.  It  may  plausibly 
be  maintained,  I  am  not  sure  that  it  cannot  more 
truly  be  maintained,  that  man  cannot  achieve  and 
need  not  achieve  this  frantic  universality.  A  man, 
I  fancy,  is  after  all  only  an  animal  that  has  noble 
preferences.  It  is  the  very  difference  between  the 
artistic  mind  and  the  mathematical  that  the  former 
sees  things  as  they  are  in  a  picture,  some  nearer  and 
larger,  some  smaller  and  further  away  :  while  to  the 
mathematical  mind  everything,  every  unit  in  a  million, 
every  fact  in  a  cosmos,  must  be  of  equal  value.  That 
is  why  mathematicians  go  mad  ;  and  poets  scarcely 
ever  do.  A  man  may  have  as  wide  a  view  of  life  as 
he  likes,  the  wider  the  better ;  a  distant  view,  a  bird's- 
eye  view,  if  he  will,  but  still  a  view  and  not  a  map. 

35 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

The  one  thing  he  cannot  attempt  in  his  version  of 
the  universe  is  to  draw  things  to  scale.  I  have  put 
myself  for  a  moment  outside  this  universalism  and 
doubted  its  validity  because  a  thing  always  appears 
more  sharp  and  personal  and  picturesque  if  we  do 
not  wholly  agree  with  it.  And  this  universalism  is 
an  essential  and  dominant  feature  of  such  great  men 
as  Watts  and  of  his  time  as  a  whole.  Mr.  Herbert 
Spencer  is  a  respectable,  almost  a  dapper,  figure,  his 
theory  is  agnostic  and  his  tone  polite  and  precise. 
And  yet  he  threw  himself  into  a  task  more  insane  and 
gigantic  than  that  of  Dante,  an  inventory  or  plan  of 
the  universe  itself ;  the  awful  vision  of  existence  as  a 
single  organism,  like  an  amoeba  on  the  disc  of  a  micro- 
scope. He  claimed,  by  implication,  to  put  in  their 
right  places  the  flaming  certainty  of  the  martyrs,  the 
wild  novelties  of  the  modern  world  ;  to  arrange  the 
eternal  rock  of  Peter  and  the  unbroken  trance  of 
Buddhism.  It  is  only  in  this  age  of  specialists,  of 
cryptic  experiences  in  art  and  faith  like  the  present, 
that  we  can  see  how  huge  was  that  enterprise  ;  but 
the  spirit  of  it  is  the  spirit  of  Watts.  The  man  of  that 
aggressive  nineteenth  century  had  many  wild  thoughts, 
but  there  was  one  thought  that  never  even  for  an 
instant  strayed  across  his  burning  brain.  He  never 
once  thought,  "  Why  should  I  understand  the  cat, 
any  more  than  the  cat  understands  me  ?  ':  He  never 
thought,  "  Why  should  I  be  just  to  the  merits  of  a 
Chinaman,  any  more  than  a  pig  studies  the  mystic 
virtues  of  a  camel  ?  "  He  affronted  heaven  and  the 
angels,  but  there  was  one  hard  arrogant  dogma  that 
he  never  doubted  even  when  he  doubted  Godhead  : 
he  never  doubted  that  he  himself  was  as  central  and 
as  responsible  as  God. 

This  paradox,   then,  we  call  the  first  element  in 
the  artistic  and  personal  claim  of  Watts,  that  he 

36 


MATTHEW    ARNOLD. 


JOHN    STUART    MILL. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

realizes  the  great  paradox  of  the  Gospel.  He  is 
meek,  but  he  claims  to  inherit  the  earth.  But  there 
is,  of  course,  a  great  deal  more  to  be  said  before  this 
view  of  the  matter  can  be  considered  complete. 
The  universalism  preached  by  Watts  and  the  other 
great  Victorians  was  of  course  subject  to  certain 
specialisations ;  it  is  not  necessary  to  call  them  limi- 
tations. Like  Matthew  Arnold,  the  last  and  most 
sceptical  of  them,  who  expressed  their  basic  idea  in  its 
most  detached  and  philosophic  form,  they  held  that 
conduct  was  three-fourths  of  life.  They  were  in- 
grainedly  ethical ;  the  mere  idea  of  thinking  anything 
more  important  than  ethics  would  have  struck  them 
as  profane.  In  this  they  were  certainly  right,  but 
they  were  nevertheless  partial  or  partisan  ;  they  did 
not  really  maintain  the  judicial  attitude  of  the  uni- 
versalist.  The  mere  thought  of  Watts  painting  a 
picture  called  The  Victory  of  Joy  over  Morality, 
or  Nature  rebuking  Conscience,  is  enough  to  show  the 
definite  limits  of  that  cosmic  equality.  This  is  not, 
of  course,  to  be  taken  as  a  fault  in  the  attitude  of 
Watts.  He  simply  draws  the  line  somewhere,  as  all 
men,  including  anarchists,  draw  it  somewhere  ;  he  is 
dogmatic,  as  all  sane  men  are  dogmatic. 

There  is  another  phase  of  this  innocent  audacity. 
It  may  appear  to  be  more  fanciful,  it  is  certainly 
more  completely  a  matter  of  inference  ;  but  it 
throws  light  on  yet  another  side  of  the  character  of 
Watts. 

Watts'  relation  to  friends  and  friendship  has 
something  about  it  very  typical.  He  is  not  a  man 
desirous  or  capable  of  a  very  large  or  rich  or  varied 
circle  of  acquaintance.  There  is  nothing  Bohemian 
about  him.  He  belongs  both  chronologically  and 
psychologically  to  that  period  which  is  earlier  even 
than  Thackeray  and  his  Cave  of  Harmony  :  he  belongs 

37 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

to    the    quiet,    struggling,    self-created    men    of    the 
forties,   with  their    tradition  of  self-abnegating  indi- 
vidualism.    Much  as  there  is  about  him  of  the  artist 
and  the  poet,  there  is  something  about  him  also  of  the 
industrious   apprentice.     That   strenuous   solitude   in 
which  Archbishop  Temple  as  a  boy  struggled  to  carry 
a  bag  of  ironmongery  which  crushed  his  back,  in  which 
Gladstone  cut  down  trees  and  John  Stuart  Mill  read 
half  the  books  of  the  world  in  boyhood,  that  strenuous 
solitude  entered  to  some  degree  into  the  very  soul 
of  Watts  and  made  him  independent  of  them.     But 
the   friends   he   made   have   as   a   general  rule    been 
very  characteristic  :    they  have   marked  the   strange 
and  haughty  fastidiousness  that  goes  along  with  his 
simplicity.     His    friends,    his    intimate    friends,    that 
is,  have  been  marked  by  a  certain  indescribable  and 
stately   worthiness  :     more   than   one   of   them   have 
been  great  men  like  himself.     The  greatest  and  most 
intimate  of  all  his  friends,  probably,  was  Tennyson, 
and  in  this  there  is  something  singularly  characteristic 
of   Watts.     About   the   actuality   of   the   intellectual 
tie  that  bound  him  to  Tennyson  there  can  be  little 
doubt.      He  painted    three,    if    not    four,    portraits 
of  him  ;  his  name  was  often  on  his  lips ;  he  invoked 
him   always   as   the   typical  great   poet,   excusing  his 
faults     and    expounding    his    virtues.     He    invoked 
his  authority  as  that  of  the  purest  of  poets,  and  invoked 
it  very  finely  and  well  in  a  sharp  controversial  inter- 
view he  had  on  the  nature  and  ethics  of  the  nude  in  art. 
At  the  time  I  write,  there  is  standing  at  the  end 
of   the  garden  at  Limnerslease  a  vast  shed,  used  for 
a  kind  of  sculptor's  studio,  in  which  there  stands  a 
splendid  but  unfinished  statue,  on  which  the  veteran 
of    the    arts    is    even    now    at    work.     It    represents 
Tennyson,  wrapped  in  his  famous  mantle,  with  his 
magnificent  head  bowed,  gazing  at  something  in  the 
38 


ROBERT    BROWNING. 


LORD    TENNYSON 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

hollow  of  his  hand.  The  subject  is  Flower  in  the 
Crannied  Wall.  There  is  something  very  charac- 
teristic of  Watts  in  the  contrast  between  the  colossal 
plan  of  the  figure  and  the  smallness  of  the  central 
object. 

But  while  the  practical  nature  of  the  friendship 
between  Watts  and  Tennyson  is  clear  enough,  there 
is  something  really  significant,  something  really  rele- 
vant to  Watts'  attitude  in  its  ultimate  and  psycho- 
logical character.  It  is  surely  most  likely  that  Watts 
and  Tennyson  were  drawn  together  because  they 
both  represented  a  certain  relation  towards  their 
art  which  is  not  common  in  our  time  and  was  scarcely 
properly  an  attribute  of  any  artists  except  these  two. 
Watts  could  not  have  found  the  thing  he  most  believed 
in  Browning  or  Swinburne  or  Morris  or  any  of  the 
other  poets.  Tennyson  could  not  have  found  the 
thing  he  most  believed  in  Leighton  or  Millais  or  any 
of  the  other  painters.  They  were  brought  together, 
it  must  be  supposed,  by  the  one  thing  that  they  had 
really  in  common,  a  profound  belief  in  the  solemnity, 
the  ceremoniousness,  the  responsibility,  and  what 
most  men  would  now,  in  all  probability,  call  the 
pomposity  of  the  great  arts. 

Watts  has  always  a  singular  kind  of  semi-mystical 
tact  in  the  matter  of  portrait  painting.  His  portraits 
are  commonly  very  faultless  comments  and  have  the 
same  kind  of  superlative  mental  delicacy  that  we  see 
in  the  picture  of  Hope.  And  the  whole  truth  of  this 
last  matter  is  very  well  expressed  in  Watts'  famous 
portrait  of  Tennyson,  particularly  if  we  look  at  it  in 
conjunction  with  his  portrait  of  Browning.  The 
head  of  Browning  is  the  head  of  a  strong,  splendid, 
joyful,  and  anxious  man  who  could  write  magnificent 
poetry.  The  head  of  Tennyson  is  the  head  of  a 
poet.  Watts  has  painted  Tennyson  with  his  dark 

39 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

dome-like  head  relieved  against  a  symbolic  green  and 
blue  of  the  eternal  sea  and  the  eternal  laurels.  He 
has  behind  him  the  bays  of  Dante  and  he  is  wrapped 
in  the  cloak  of  the  prophets.  Browning  is  dressed 
like  an  ordinary  modern  man,  and  we  at  once  feel 
that  it  should  and  must  be  so.  To  dress  Browning 
in  the  prophet's  robe  and  the  poet's  wreath  would 
strike  us  all  as  suddenly  ridiculous ;  it  would  be  like 
sending  him  to  a  fancy-dress  ball.  It  would  be  like 
attiring  Matthew  Arnold  in  the  slashed  tights  of  an 
Elizabethan,  or  putting  Mr.  Lecky  into  a  primitive 
Celto-Irish  kilt.  But  it  does  not  strike  us  as  absurd 
in  the  case  of  Tennyson :  it  does  not  strike  us  as  even 
eccentric  or  outlandish  or  remote.  We  think  of 
Tennyson  in  that  way;  we  think  of  him  as  a  lordly 
and  conscious  bard.  Some  part  of  this  fact  may, 
of  course,  be  due  to  his  possession  of  a  magnificent 
physical  presence ;  but  not,  I  think,  all.  Lord 
Kitchener  (let  us  say)  is  a  handsome  man,  but  we 
should  laugh  at  him  very  much  in  silver  armour. 
It  is  much  more  due  to  the  fact  that  Tennyson 
really  assumed  and  was  granted  this  stately  and  epic 
position.  It  is  not  true  that  Tennyson  was  more  of 
a  poet  than  Browning,  if  we  mean  by  that  statement 
that  Browning  could  not  compose  forms  as  artistic 
and  well-managed,  lyrics  as  light  and  poignant,  and 
rhythms  as  swelling  and  stirring  as  any  in  English 
letters.  But  it  is  true  that  Tennyson  was  more  of  a 
poet  than  Browning,  if  we  mean  by  that  statement 
that  Tennyson  was  a  poet  in  person,  in  post  and  cir- 
cumstance and  conception  of  life  ;  and  that  Browning 
was  not,  in  that  sense,  a  poet  at  all.  Browning  first 
inaugurated  in  modern  art  and  letters  the  notion  or 
tradition,  in  many  ways  perhaps  a  more  wholesome 
one,  that  the  fact  that  a  man  pursued  the  trade  or 
practice  of  poetry  was  his  own  affair  and  a  thing  apart, 
40 


THE     DWELLER    IN    THE     INNERMOST. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

like  the  fact  that  he  collected  coins  or  earned  his 
living  as  a  hatter.  But  Tennyson  really  belonged 
to  an  older  tradition,  the  tradition  that  believed  that 
the  poet,  the  appointed  "  Vates,"  was  a  recognized 
and  public  figure  like  the  bard  or  jester  at  the  mediaeval 
courts,  like  the  prophet  in  the  old  Commonwealth  of 
Israel.  In  Tennyson's  work  appeared  for  the  last 
time  in  English  history  this  notion  of  the  stately  and 
public  and  acknowledged  poet :  it  was  the  lay  of  the 
last  minstrel. 

Now  there  is  in  Watts,  gentle  and  invisible  as  he  is, 
something  that  profoundly  responds  to  that  spirit. 
Leighton,  like  Browning,  was  a  courtier  and  man  of 
the  world  :  Millais,  like  Browning,  was  a  good  fellow 
and  an  ordinary  gentleman  :  but  Watts  has  more  of 
Tennyson  in  him  ;  he  believes  in  a  great  priesthood  of 
art.  He  believes  in  a  certain  pure  and  childish 
publicity.  If  anyone  suggested  that  before  a  man 
ventured  to  paint  pictures  or  to  daub  with  plaster 
he  should  be  initiated  with  some  awful  rites  in  some 
vast  and  crowded  national  temple,  should  swear  to 
work  worthily  before  some  tremendous  altar  or  over 
some  symbolic  flame,  Millais  would  have  laughed 
heartily  at  the  idea  and  Leighton  also.  But  it  would 
not  seem  either  absurd  or  unreasonable  to  Watts.  In 
the  thick  of  this  smoky  century  he  is  living  in  a  clear 
age  of  heroes. 

Watts'  relations  to  Tennyson  were  indeed  very 
characteristic  of  what  was  finest,  and  at  the  same 
time  quaintest,  in  the  two  men.  The  painter,  with 
a  typical  sincerity,  took  the  poet  seriously,  I  had 
almost  said  literally,  in  his  daily  life,  and  liked  him  to 
live  up  to  his  poetry.  The  poet,  with  that  queer  sulky 
humour  which  gave  him,  perhaps,  more  breadth 
than  Watts,  but  less  strength,  said,  after  reading 
some  acid  and  unjust  criticisms,  "  I  wish  I  had  never 

41 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

written  a  line."  "  Come,"  said  Watts,  "  you  wouldn't 
like  '  King  Arthur '  to  talk  like  that."  Tennyson 
paused  a  moment  and  then  spread  out  his  fingers. 
"  Well,"  he  said,  "  what  do  you  expect  ?  It's  all 
the  gout."  The  artist,  with  a  characteristic  power  of 
juvenile  and  immortal  hero-worship,  tells  this  story 
as  an  instance  of  the  fundamental  essence  of  odd 
magnanimity  and  sombre  geniality  in  Tennyson. 
It  is  such  an  instance  and  a  very  good  one :  but  it  is 
also  an  instance  of  the  sharp  logical  idealism,  of  the 
prompt  poetic  candour  of  Watts.  He  asked  Tennyson 
to  be  King  Arthur,  and  it  never  occurred  to  him  to 
think  that  he  was  asking  Addison  to  be  Cato,  or 
Massinger  to  be  Saint  Dorothy.  The  incident  is  a 
fine  tribute  to  a  friendship. 

The  real  difficulty  which  many  cultivated  people 
have  in  the  matter  of  Watts'  allegorical  pictures  is 
far  more  difficult.  It  is  indeed  nothing  else  but  the 
great  general  reaction  against  allegorical  art  which 
has  arisen  during  the  last  artistic  period.  The  only 
way  in  which  we  can  study,  with  any  real  sincerity,  the 
allegoric  art  of  Watts  is  to  ask  to  what  is  really  due 
the  objection  to  allegory  which  has  thus  arisen.  The 
real  objection  to  allegory  is,  it  may  roughly  be  said, 
founded  upon  the  conception  that  allegory  involves 
one  art  imitating  another.  This  is,  up  to  a  certain 
point,  true.  To  paint  a  figure  in  a  blue  robe  and 
call  her  Necessity,  and  then  paint  a  small  figure  in  a 
yellow  robe  and  call  it  Invention  ;  to  put  the  second 
on  the  knee  of  the  first,  and  then  say  that  you  are 
enunciating  the  sublime  and  eternal  truth,  that 
Necessity  is  the  mother  of  Invention,  this  is  indeed  an 
idle  and  foolish  affair.  It  is  saying  in  six  weeks'  work 
with  brush  and  palette  knife  what  could  be  said  much 
better  in  six  words.  And  there  can  be  no  reasonable 
dispute  that  of  this  character  were  a  considerable 

42 


GEORGE    MEREDITH. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

number  of  the  allegorical  pictures  that  have  crowded 
the  galleries  and  sprawled  over  the  ceilings  of  ancient 
and  modern   times.      Of    such  were  the   monstrous 
pictures  of  Rubens,  which  depicted  a  fat  Religion  and 
a  bloated  Temperance  dancing  before  some  foreign 
conqueror  ;    of  such  were  the  florid  designs  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  which  showed  Venus  and  Apollo 
encouraging    Lord    Peterborough    to    get    over    the 
inconvenience  of  his  breastplate  ;   of  such,  again,  were 
the  meek  Victorian  allegories  which  showed  Mercy 
and  Foresight  urging  men  to  found  a  Society  for  the 
Preservation  of  Young  Game.     Of  such  were  almost 
all  the  allegories  which  have  dominated  the  art  of 
Europe    for    many    centuries    back.     Of    such,    most 
emphatically,  the  allegories  of  Watts  are  not.     They 
are  not  mere  pictorial  forms,  combined  as  in  a  kind 
of  cryptogram  to  express  theoretic  views  or  relations , 
They  are  not  proverbs  or  verbal  relations  rendered 
with  a  cumbrous  exactitude  in  oil  and  Chinese  white. 
They  are  not,  in  short,  the  very  thing  that  the  oppo- 
nents of  Watts  and  his  school  say  that  they  are.     They 
are  not  merely  literary.     There  is  one  definite  current 
conception  on  which  this  idea  that  Watts'  allegorical 
art  is  merely  literary  is  eventually  based.     It  is  based 
upon  the  idea  that  lies  at  the  root  of  rationalism,  at 
the  root  of  useless  logomachies,  at  the  root,  in  no  small 
degree,  of  the  whole  modern  evil.     It  is  based  on  the 
assumption    of    the    perfection    of    language.     Every 
religion  and  every  philosophy  must,  of  course,  be  based 
on  the  assumption  of  the  authority  or  the  accuracy 
of  something.     But  it  may  well  be  questioned  whether 
it  is  not  saner  and  more  satisfactory  to  ground  our 
faith  on  the  infallibility  of  the  Pope,  or  the  infalli- 
bility of  the  Book  of  Mormon,  than  on  this  astounding 
modern  dogma  of  the  infallibility  of  human  speech. 
Every  time  one  man  says  to  another,  "  Tell  us  plainly 

43 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

what  you  mean  ?  ri  he  is  assuming  the  infallibility 
of  language  :  that  is  to  say,  he  is  assuming  that 
there  is  a  perfect  scheme  of  verbal  expression  for  all 
the  internal  moods  and  meanings  of  men.  Whenever 
a  man  says  to  another,  "  Prove  your  case  ;  defend 
your  faith,"  he  is  assuming  the  infallibility  of  lan- 
guage :  that  is  to  say,  he  is  assuming  that  a  man  has  a 
word  for  every  reality  in  earth,  or  heaven,  or  hell. 
He  knows  that  there  are  in  the  soul  tints  more 
bewildering,  more  numberless,  and  more  nameless 
than  the  colours  of  an  autumn  forest ;  he  knows  that 
there  are  abroad  in  the  world  and  doing  strange  and 
terrible  service  in  it  crimes  that  have  never  been 
condemned  and  virtues  that  have  never  been  christened. 
Yet  he  seriously  believes  that  these  things  can  every 
one  of  them,  in  all  their  tones  and  semi-tones,  in  all 
their  blends  and  unions,  be  accurately  represented 
by  an  arbitrary  system  of  grunts  and  squeals.  He 
believes  that  an  ordinary  civilized  stockbroker  can  really 
produce  out  of  his  own  inside  noises  which  denote  all 
the  mysteries  of  memory  and  all  the  agonies  of  desire. 
Whenever,  on  the  other  hand,  a  man  rebels  faintly  or 
vaguely  against  this  way  of  speaking,  whenever  a 
man  says  that  he  cannot  explain  what  he  means,  and 
that  he  hates  argument,  that  his  enemy  is  misrepre- 
senting him,  but  he  cannot  explain  how ;  that  man  is 
a  true  sage,  and  has  seen  into  the  heart  of  the  real 
nature  of  language.  Whenever  a  man  refuses  to  be 
caught  by  some  dilemma  about  reason  and  passion, 
or  about  reason  and  faith,  or  about  fate  and  free-will, 
he  has  seen  the  truth.  Whenever  a  man  declines  to  be 
cornered  as  an  egotist,  or  an  altruist,  or  any  such 
modern  monster,  he  has  seen  the  truth.  For  the  truth 
is  that  language  is  not  a  scientific  thing  at  all,  but 
wholly  an  artistic  thing,  a  thing  invented  by  hunters, 
and  killers,  and  such  artists  long  before  science  was 

44 


Ul 

u 


U 

Q 
Z 


UJ 

X 
ou 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

dreamed  of.  The  truth  is  simply  that — that  the 
tongue  is  not  a  reliable  instrument,  like  a  theodolite 
or  a  camera.  The  tongue  is  most  truly  an  unruly 
member,  as  the  wise  saint  has  called  it,  a  thing  poetic 
and  dangerous,  like  music  or  fire. 

Now  we  can  easily  imagine  an  alternative  state  of 
things,  roughly  similar  to  that  produced  in  Watts' 
allegories,  a  system,  that  is  to  say,  whereby  the  moods 
or  facts  of  the  human  spirit  were  conveyed  by  some- 
thing other  than  speech,  by  shapes  or  colours  or  some 
such  things.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  of  course,  there  are 
a  great  many  other  languages  besides  the  verbal. 
Descriptions  of  spiritual  states  and  mental  purposes 
are  conveyed  by  a  variety  of  things,  by  hats,  by  bells, 
by  guns,  by  fires  on  a  headland,  or  by  jerks  of  the  head. 
In  fact  there  does  exist  an  example  which  is  singu- 
larly analogous  to  decorative  and  symbolic  painting. 
This  is  a  scheme  of  aesthetic  signs  or  emblems,  simple 
indeed  and  consisting  only  of  a  few  elemental  colours, 
which  is  actually  employed  to  convey  great  lessons  in 
human  safety  and  great  necessities  of  the  common- 
wealth. It  need  hardly  be  said  that  I  allude  to  the 
railway  signals.  They  are  as  much  a  language,  and 
surely  as  solemn  a  language,  as  the  colour  sequence  of 
ecclesiastical  vestments,  which  sets  us  red  for  martyr- 
dom, and  white  for  resurrection.  For  the  green  and 
red  of  the  night-signals  depict  the  two  most  funda- 
mental things  of  all,  which  lie  at  the  back  of  all  lan- 
guage. Yes  and  no,  good  and  bad,  safe  and  unsafe, 
life  and  death.  It  is  perfectly  conceivable  that  a 
degree  of  flexibility  or  subtlety  might  be  introduced 
into  these  colours  so  as  to  suggest  other  and  more 
complex  meanings.  We  might  (under  the  influence 
of  some  large  poetic  station-masters)  reach  a  state 
of  things  in  which  a  certain  rich  tinge  of  purple  in 
the  crimson  light  would  mean,  **  Travel  for  a  few 

45 


GEORGE    FREDERICK   WATTS 

seconds  at  a  slightly  more  lingering  pace,  that  a 
romantic  old  lady  in  a  first-class  carriage  may  admire 
the  scenery  of  the  forest."  A  tendency  towards 
peacock  blue  in  the  green  might  mean  "  An  old 
gentleman  with  a  black  necktie  has  just  drunk  a  glass 
of  sherry  at  the  station  restaurant."  But  however 
much  we  modified  or  varied  this  colour  sequence 
or  colour  language,  there  would  remain  one  thing 
which  it  would  be  quite  ridiculous  and  untrue  to  say 
about  it.  It  would  be  quite  ridiculous  and  untrue 
to  say  that  this  colour  sequence  was  simply  a  symbol 
representing  language.  It  would  be  another  lan- 
guage :  it  would  convey  its  meaning  to  aliens  who 
had  another  word  for  forest,  and  another  word  for 
sherry,  and  another  word  for  old  lady.  It  would  not 
be  a  symbol  of  language,  a  symbol  of  a  symbol ;  it 
would  be  one  symbol  of  the  reality,  and  language 
would  be  another.  That  is  precisely  the  true  position 
touching  allegorical  art  in  general,  and,  above  all,  the 
allegorical  art  of  Watts. 

So  long  as  we  conceive  that  it  is,  fundamentally, 
the  symbolizing  of  literature  in  paint,  we  shall  certainly 
misunderstand  it  and  the  rare  and  peculiar  merits, 
both  technical  and  philosophical,  which  really  charac- 
terize it.  If  the  ordinary  spectator  at  the  art  galleries 
finds  himself,  let  us  say,  opposite  a  picture  of  a  dancing 
flower-crowned  figure  in  a  rose-coloured  robe,  he 
feels  a  definite  curiosity  to  know  the  title,  looks  it  up 
in  the  catalogue,  and  finds  that  it  is  called,  let  us  say, 
"  Hope."  He  is  immediately  satisfied,  as  he  would 
have  been  if  the  title  had  run  "Portrait  of  Lady 
Warwick,"  a  "  View  of  Kilchurn  Castle."  It  repre- 
sents a  certain  definite  thing,  the  word  "  hope." 
But  what  does  the  word  "  hope "  represent  ?  It 
represents  only  a  broken  instantaneous  glimpse  of 
something  that  is  immeasurably  older  and  wilder 


HOPE. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

than  language,  that  is  immeasurably  older  and  wilder 

than  man  ;  a  mystery  to  saints  and  a  reality  to  wolves. 

To  suppose  that  such  a  thing  is  dealt  with  by  the  word 

"  hope,"  any  more  than  America  is  represented  by  a 

distant  view  of  Cape  Horn,  would  indeed  be  ridiculous. 

It  is  not  merely  true  that  the  word  itself  is,  like  any 

other  word,  arbitrary  ;  that  it  might  as  well  be  "  pig." 

or  "  parasol "  ;    but  it  is  true  that  the  philosophical 

meaning  of  the  word,  in  the  conscious  mind  of  man, 

is  merely  a  part  of  something  immensely  larger  in  the 

unconscious  mind,  that  the  gusty  light  of  language 

only  falls   for   a   moment   on  a   fragment,   and  that 

obviously  a  semi-detached,  unfinished  fragment  of  a 

certain    definite    pattern    on   the    dark   tapestries    of 

reality.     It  is  vain  and  worse  than  vain  to  declaim 

against  the  allegoric,  for  the  very  word  "  hope  "  is  an 

allegory,  and  the  very  word  "  allegory"  is  an  allegory. 

Now  let  us  suppose  that  instead  of  coming  before 

that   hypothetical   picture   of   Hope  in   conventional 

flowers   and   conventional   pink  robes,   the   spectator 

came  before  another  picture.     Suppose  that  he  found 

himself  in  the  presence  of  a  dim  canvas  with  a  bowed 

angl   stricken   and   secretive    figure   cowering   over   a 

broken  lyre  in  the  twilight.     What  would  he  think  ? 

His  first  thought,  of  course,  would  be  that  the  picture 

was  called  Despair ;    his  second  (when  he  discovered 

his  error  in  the  catalogue),  that   it  has  been  entered 

under  the  wrong  number ;   his  third,  that  the  painter 

was  mad.     But  if  we  imagine  that  he  overcame  these 

preliminary  feelings   and  that   as   he   stared   at   that 

queer  twilight  picture   a  dim  and  powerful  sense  of 

meaning  began  to  grow  upon  him — what  would  he 

see  ?     He  would  see   something  for  which  there  is 

neither  speech  nor  language,  which  has  been  too  vast 

for  any  eye  to  see  and  too  secret  for  any  religion  to 

utter,  even  as  an  esoteric  doctrine.    Standing  before 

47 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

that  picture,  he  finds  himself  in  the  presence  of  a  great 
truth.  He  perceives  that  there  is  something  in  man 
which  is  always  apparently  on  the  eve  of  disappearing, 
but  never  disappears,  an  assurance  which  is  always 
apparently  saying  farewell  and  yet  illimitably  lingers, 
a  string  which  is  always  stretched  to  snapping  and  yet 
never  snaps.  He  perceives  that  the  queerest  and 
most  delicate  thing  in  us,  the  most  fragile,,  the  most 
fantastic,  is  in  truth  the  backbone  and  indestructible. 
He  knows  a  great  moral  fact  :  that  there  never  was  an 
age  of  assurance,  that  there  never  was  an  age  of  faith. 
Faith  is  always  at  a  disadvantage  ;  it  is  a  perpetually 
defeated  thing  which  survives  all  its  conquerors. 
The  desperate  modern  talk  about  dark  days  and  reeling 
altars,  and  the  end  of  Gods  and  angels,  is  the  oldest 
talk  in  the  world  :  lamentations  over  the  growth  of 
agnosticism  can  be  found  in  the  monkish  sermons 
of  the  dark  ages  ;  horror  at  youthful  impiety  can  be 
found  in  the  Iliad.  This  is  the  thing  that  never 
deserts  men  and  yet  always,  with  daring  diplomacy, 
threatens  to  desert  them.  It  has  indeed  dwelt  among 
and  controlled  all  the  kings  and  crowds,  but  only 
with  the  air  of  a  pilgrim  passing  by.  It  has  indeed 
warmed  and  lit  men  from  the  beginning  of  Eden  with 
an  unending  glow,  but  it  was  the  glow  of  an  eternal 
sunset. 

Here,  in  this  dim  picture,  its  trick  is  almost 
betrayed.  No  one  can  name  this  picture  properly, 
but  Watts,  who  painted  it,  has  named  it  Hope.  But 
the  point  is  that  this  title  is  not  (as  those  think  who 
call  it  "  literary ")  the  reality  behind  the  symbol, 
but  another  symbol  for  the  same  thing,  or,  to  speak 
yet  more  strictly,  another  symbol  describing  another 
part  or  aspect  of  the  same  complex  reality.  Two 
men  felt  a  swift,  violent,  invisible  thing  in  the  world  : 
one  said  the  word  "  hope,"  the  other  painted  a 


JONAH. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

picture  in  blue  and  green  paint.  The  picture  is 
inadequate  ;  the  word  "  hope  "  is  inadequate  ;  but 
between  them,  like  two  angles  in  the  calculation 
of  a  distance,  they  almost  locate  a  mystery,  a  mystery 
that  for  hundreds  of  ages  has  been  hunted  by  men 
and  evaded  them.  And  the  title  is  therefore  not  so 
much  the  substance  of  one  of  Watts'  pictures,  it  is 
rather  an  epigram  upon  it.  It  is  merely  an  approxi- 
mate attempt  to  convey,  by  snatching  up  the  tool  of 
another  craftsman,  the  direction  attempted  in  the 
painter's  own  craft.  He  calls  it  Hope,  and  that  is 
perhaps  the  best  title.  It  reminds  us  among  other 
things  of  a  fact  which  is  too  little  remembered,  that 
faith,  hope,  and  charity,  the  three  mystical  virtues 
of  Christianity,  are  also  the  gayest  of  the  virtues. 
Paganism,  as  I  have  suggested,  is  not  gay,  but  rather 
nobly  sad;  the  spirit  of  Watts,  which  is  as  a  rule 
nobly  sad  also,  here  comes  nearer  perhaps  than  any- 
where else  to  mysticism  in  the  strict  sense,  the  mysti- 
cism which  is  full  of  secret  passion  and  belief,  like  that 
of  Fra  Angelico  or  Blake.  But  though  Watts  calls 
his  tremendous  reality  Hope,  we  may  call  it  many  other 
things.  Call  it  faith,  call  it  vitality,  call  it  the  will 
to  live,  call  it  the  religion  of  to-morrow  morning, 
call  it  the  immortality  of  man,  call  it  self-love  and 
vanity  ;  it  is  the  thing  that  explains  why  man  survives 
all  things  and  why  there  is  no  such  thing  as  a  pessi- 
mist. It  cannot  be  found  in  any  dictionary  or 
rewarded  in  any  commonwealth  :  there  is  only  one 
way  in  which  it  can  even  be  noticed  and  recognized. 
If  there  be  anywhere  a  man  who  has  really  lost  it, 
his  face  out  of  a  whole  crowd  of  men  will  strike  us 
like  a  blow.  He  may  hang  himself  or  become 
Prime  Minister ;  it  matters  nothing.  The  man  is 
dead. 

Now,  of  course  the  ordinary  objection  to  allegory, 

D  49 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

and  it  is  a  very  sound  objection,  can  be  sufficiently 
well  stated  by  saying  that  the  pictorial  figures  are  mere 
arbitrary  symbols  of  the  words.  An  allegorist  of  the 
pompous  school  might  paint  some  group  of  Peace 
and  Commerce  doing  something  to  Britannia.  There 
might  be  a  figure  of  Commerce  in  a  Greek  robe  with 
a  cornucopia  or  bag  of  gold  or  an  argosy  or  any  other 
conventional  symbol.  But  it  is  surely  quite  evident 
that  such  a  figure  is  a  mere  sign  like  the  word  com- 
merce :  the  word  might  just  as  well  be  "  dandelion," 
and  the  Greek  lady  with  the  cornucopia  might  just 
as  well  be  a  Hebrew  prophet  standing  on  his  head. 
It  is  scarcely  even  a  language  :  it  is  a  cipher-code. 
Nobody  can  maintain  that  the  figure,  taken  as  a  figure, 
makes  one  think  of  commerce,  of  the  forces  that 
effect  commerce,  of  a  thousand  ports,  of  a  thousand 
streets,  of  a  thousand  warehouses  and  bills  of  lading, 
of  a  thousand  excited  men  in  black  coats  who  certainly 
would  not  know  what  to  do  with  a  cornucopia.  If 
we  find  ourselves  gazing  at  some  monument  of  the 
fragile  and  eternal  faith  of  man,  at  some  ruined  chapel, 
at  some  nameless  altar,  at  some  scrap  of  old  Jacobin 
eloquence,  we  might  actually  find  our  own  minds 
moving  in  certain  curves  that  centre  in  the  curved 
back  of  Watts'  Hope:  we  might  almost  think  for 
ourselves  of  a  bowed  figure  in  the  twilight,  holding 
to  her  breast  something  damaged  but  undestroyed. 
But  can  anyone  say  that  by  merely  looking  at  the 
Stock  Exchange  on  a  busy  day  we  should  think  of  a 
Greek  lady  with  an  argosy  ?  Can  anyone  say  that 
Threadneedle  Street,  in  itself,  would  inspire  our  minds 
to  move  in  the  curves  which  centre  in  a  cornucopia  ? 
Can  anyone  say  that  a  very  stolid  figure  in  a  very 
outlandish  drapery  is  anything  but  a  purely  arbitrary 
sign,  like  x  or  y,  for  such  a  thing  as  modern  commerce, 
for  the  savagery  of  the  rich,  for  the  hunger  of  the 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

satisfied,  for  the  vast  tachycardia  or  galloping  of  the 
heart  that  has  fallen  on  all  the  great  new  centres  of 
civilization,  for  the  sudden  madness  of  all  the  mills  of 
the  world  ? 

Watts'  Hope  does  tell  us  something  more  about 
the  nature  of  hope  than  we  can  be  told  by  merely 
noticing  that  hope  is  shown  in  individual  cases  : 
that  a  man  rehearses  successful  love  speeches  when  he 
is  in  love,  and  takes  a  return  ticket  when  he  goes  out 
to  fight  a  duel.  But  the  figure  of  Commerce  with 
the  cornucopia  gives  us  less  insight  into  what  is  behind 
commerce  than  we  might  get  from  reading  a  circular 
or  staring  out  into  the  street.  In  the  case  of  Com- 
merce the  figure  is  merely  a  symbol  of  commerce, 
which  is  a  symbol.  In  the  case  of  Hope  the  matter 
is  quite  the  other  way ;  the  figure  brings  us  nearer 
to  something  which  is  not  a  symbol,  but  the  reality 
behind  symbols.  In  the  one  case  we  go  further 
down  towards  the  river's  delta ;  in  the  other,  further 
up  towards  its  fountain ;  that  at  least  may  be  called 
a  difference.  And  now,  suppose  that  our  imaginary 
sight-seer  who  had  seen  so  much  of  the  pompous 
allegory  of  Commerce  in  her  Grecian  draperies  were 
to  see,  for  the  second  time,  a  second  picture.  Suppose 
he  saw  before  him  a  throned  figure  clad  in  splendid, 
heavy  scarlet  and  gold,  above  the  lustre  and  dignity 
of  which  rose,  in  abrupt  contrast,  a  face  like  the  face 
of  a  blind  beast.  Suppose  that  as  this  imperial  thing, 
with  closed  eyes  and  fat,  sightless  face,  sat  upon  his 
magnificent  seat,  he  let  his  heavy  hand  and  feet  fall, 
as  if  by  a  mere  pulverizing  accident,  on  the  naked 
and  god-like  figures  of  the  young,  on  men  and  women. 
Suppose  that  in  the  background  there  rose  straight 
into  the  air  a  raw  and  turgid  smoke,  as  if  from  some 
invisible  and  horrible  sacrifice,  and  that  by  one  final, 
fantastic,  and  triumphal  touch  this  all-destroying  god 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

and  king  were  adorned  with  the  ears  of  an  ass,  declaring 
that  he  was  royal,  imperial,  irresistible,  and,  when  all 
is  said,  imbecile.  Suppose  that  a  man  sick  of  argosies 
and  cornucopias  came  before  that  picture,  would  he 
not  say,  perhaps  even  before  he  looked  in  the  catalogue 
and  found  that  the  painter  had  called  it  Mammon, 
would  he  not  say,  "  This  is  something  which  in  spirit 
and  in  essence  I  have  seen  before,  something  which  in 
spirit  and  in  essence  I  have  seen  everywhere.  That 
bloated,  unconscious  face,  so  heavy,  so  violent,  so 
wicked,  so  innocent,  have  I  not  seen  it  at  street 
corners,  in  billiard-rooms,  in  saloon  bars,  laying  down 
the  law  about  Chartered  shares  or  gaping  at  jokes 
about  women  ?  Those  huge  and  smashing  limbs, 
so  weighty,  so  silly,  so  powerless,  and  yet  so  powerful, 
have  I  not  seen  them  in  the  pompous  movements,  the 
morbid  health  of  the  prosperous  in  the  great  cities  ? 
The  hard,  straight  pillars  of  that  throne,  have  I  not 
seen  them  in  the  hard,  straight,  hideous  tiers  of  modern 
warehouses  and  factories  ?  That  tawny  and  sulky 
smoke,  have  I  not  seen  it  going  up  to  heaven  from  all 
the  cities  of  the  coming  world  ?  This  is  no  trifling 
with  argosies  and  Greek  drapery.  This  is  commerce. 
This  is  the  home  of  the  god  himself.  This  is  why  men  hate 
him,  and  why  men  fear  him,  and  why  men  endure  him." 
Now,  of  course,  it  is  at  once  obvious  that  this  view 
would  be  very  unjust  to  commerce  ;  but  that  modi- 
fication, as  a  matter  of  fact,  very  strongly  supports 
the  general  theory  at  the  moment  under  consideration. 
Commerce  is  really  an  arbitrary  phrase,  a  thing 
including  a  million  motives,  from  the  motive  which 
makes  a  man  drink  to  the  motive  which  makes  him 
reform  ;  from  the  motive  that  makes  a  starving  man 
eat  a  horse  to  the  motive  which  makes  an  idle  man 
chase  a  butterfly.  But  whatever  other  spirits  there 
are  in  commerce,  there  is,  beyond  all  reasonable 
52 


MAMMON 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

question,  in  it  this  powerful  and  enduring  spirit 
which  Watts  has  painted.  There  is,  as  a  ruling  element 
in  modern  life,  in  all  life,  this  blind  and  asinine 
appetite  for  mere  power.  There  is  a  spirit  abroad 
among  the  nations  of  the  earth  which  drives  men 
incessantly  on  to  destroy  what  they  cannot  under- 
stand, and  to  capture  what  they  cannot  enjoy.  This, 
and  not  commerce,  is  what  Watts  has  painted.  He  has 
painted,  not  the  allegory  of  a  great  institution,  but  the 
vision  of  a  great  appetite,  the  vision  of  a  great  motive. 
It  is  not  true  that  this  is  a  picture  of  Commerce  ; 
but  that  Commerce  and  Watts'  picture  spring  from 
the  same  source.  There  does  exist  a  certain  dark  and 
driving  force  in  the  world ;  one  of  its  products  is 
this  picture,  another  is  Commerce.  The  picture  is 
not  Commerce,  it  is  Mammon.  And,  indeed,  so 
powerfully  and  perfectly  has  Watts,  in  this  case, 
realized  the  awful  being  whom  he  was  endeavouring 
to  call  up  by  his  artistic  incantation,  that  we  may 
even  say  the  common  positions  of  allegory  and  reality 
are  reversed.  The  fact  is  not  that  here  we  have  an 
effective  presentation  under  a  certain  symbol  of  red 
robes  and  smoke  and  a  throne,  of  what  the  financial 
world  is,  but  rather  that  here  we  have  something 
of  the  truth  that  is  hidden  behind  the  symbol  of 
white  waistcoats  and  hats  on  the  back  of  the  head,  of 
financial  papers  and  sporting  prophets,  of  butter 
closing  quiet  and  Pendragon  being  meant  to  win. 
This  is  not  a  symbol  of  commerce  :  commerce  is  a 
symbol  of  this. 

In  sketching  this  general  and  necessary  attitude 
towards  the  art  of  Watts,  particularly  in  the  matter 
of  allegory,  I  have  taken  deliberately  these  two  very 
famous  and  obvious  pictures,  and  I  have  occupied, 
equally  deliberately,  a  considerable  amount  of  space 
in  expounding  them.  It  is  far  better  in  a  subject  so 

53 


GEORGE    FREDERICK    WATTS 

subtle  and  so  bewildering  as  the  relation  between 
art  and  philosophy,  that  we  should  see  how  our  con- 
ceptions and  hypotheses  really  get  on  when  applied 
systematically  and  at  some  length  to  some  perfectly 
familiar  and  existent  object.  A  philosopher  cannot 
talk  about  any  single  thing,  down  to  a  pumpkin, 
without  showing  whether  he  is  wise  or  foolish  ;  but 
he  can  easily  talk  about  everything  with  anyone  having 
any  views  about  him  beyond  gloomy  suspicions. 
But  at  this  point  I  become  fully  conscious  of  another 
and  most  important  kind  of  criticism,  which  has 
been  and  can  be  levelled  against  the  allegories  of 
Watts ;  and  which  must  be,  by  the  nature  of  things, 
evoked  by  the  particular  line  of  discussion  or  reflection 
that  I  have  here  adopted. 

It  may  be  admitted  that  Watts'  art  is  not  merely 
literary  in  the  sense  in  which  I  have  originally  used  the 
term.  It  may  be  admitted  that  there  is  truth  in  the 
general  position  I  have  sketched  out — that  Watts 
is  not  a  man  copying  literature  or  philosophy,  but 
rather  a  man  copying  the  great  spiritual  and  central 
realities  which  literature  and  philosophy  also  set  out 
to  copy.  It  may  be  admitted  that  Mammon  is  ob- 
viously an  attempt  to  portray,  not  a  twopenny  phrase, 
but  a  great  idea.  But  along  with  all  these  admissions 
it  will  certainly  be  said,  by  the  most  powerful  and 
recent  school  in  art  criticism,  that  all  this  amounts 
to  little  more  than  a  difference  between  a  mean  and 
a  magnificent  blunder.  Pictorial  art,  it  will  be  said, 
has  no  more  business,  as  such,  to  portray  great  ideas 
than  small  ideas.  Its  affair  is  with  its  own  technique, 
with  the  love  of  a  great  billowing  line  for  its  own 
sake,  of  a  subtle  and  perfect  tint  for  its  own  sake. 
If  a  man  mistakes  his  trade  and  attends  to  the  tech- 
nique of  another,  the  sublimity  of  his  mind  is  only  a 
very  slight  consolation.  If  I  summon  a  paperhanger 

54 


DEATH    CROWNING     INNOCENCE. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

to  cover  the  walls,  and  he  insists  on  playing  the  piano, 
it  matters  little  whether  he  plays  Beethoven  or 
"  The  Yachmak."  If  I  charter  a  pianist,  and  he  is 
found  drinking  in  the  wine  cellar,  it  matters  little 
whether  he  has  made  his  largest  hole  in  good  Burgundy 
or  bad  Marsala.  If  the  whole  of  this  question  of 
great  ideas  and  small  ideas,  of  large  atmospheres 
and  superficial  definitions,  of  the  higher  and  the 
lower  allegory — if  all  this  be  really  irrelevant  to  the 
discussion  of  the  position  of  a  painter,  then,  indeed, 
we  have  been  upon  an  idle  track.  As  I  think  I  shall 
show  in  a  moment,  this  is  a  very  inadequate  view  of  the 
matter.  But  it  does  draw  our  attention  to  an  aspect 
of  the  matter  which  must,  without  further  delay,  be 
discussed.  That  aspect,  as  I  need  hardly  say,  is  the 
technique  of  Watts. 

There  is  of  course  a  certain  tendency  among  all 
interesting  and  novel  critical  philosophers  to  talk 
as  if  they  had  discovered  things  which  it  is  perfectly 
impossible  that  any  human  being  could  ever  have 
denied ;  to  shout  that  the  birds  fly,  and  declare 
that  in  spite  of  persecution  they  will  still  assert  that 
cows  have  four  legs.  In  this  way  some  raw  pseudo- 
scientists  talk  about  heredity  or  the  physical  basis 
of  life  as  if  it  were  not  a  thing  embedded  in  every 
creed  and  legend,  and  even  the  very  languages  of  men. 
In  this  way  some  of  the  new  oligarchists  of  to-day 
imagine  they  are  attacking  the  doctrine  of  human 
equality  by  pointing  out  that  some  men  are  stronger 
or  cleverer  than  others ;  as  if  they  really  believed 
that  Danton  and  Washington  thought  that  every 
man  was  the  same  height  and  had  the  same  brains. 
And  something  of  this  preliminary  cloud  of  folly  or 
misunderstanding  attaches  doubtless  to  the  question 
of  the  technical  view — that  is,  the  solely  technical 
view — of  painting.  If  the  principle  of  "  art  for  art's 

55 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

sake  "  means  simply  that  there  is  a  solely  technical 
view  of  painting,  and  that  it  must  be  supreme  on  its 
own  ground,  it  appears  a  piece  of  pure  madness  to 
suppose  it  other  than  true.  Surely  there  never  was 
really  a  man  who  held  that  a  picture  that  was  vile  in 
colour  and  weak  in  drawing  was  a  good  picture  because 
it  was  a  picture  of  Florence  Nightingale  !  Surely 
there  never  was  really  a  man  who  said  that  when 
one  leg  in  a  drawing  was  longer  than  another,  yet 
they  were  both  the  same  length  because  the  artist 
painted  it  for  an  altar-piece  !  When  the  new  critics 
with  a  burst  of  music  and  a  rocket  shower  of  epigrams 
enunciated  their  new  criticism,  they  must  at  any  rate 
have  meant  something  more  than  this.  Undoubtedly 
they  did  mean  something  more  ;  they  meant  that  a 
picture  was  not  a  good  vehicle  for  moral  sentiment 
at  all ;  they  meant  that  not  only  was  it  not  the  better 
for  having  a  philosophic  meaning,  but  that  it  was 
worse.  This,  if  it  be  true,  is  beyond  all  question  a 
real  indictment  of  Watts. 

About  the  whole  of  this  Watts  controversy  about 
didactic  art  there  is  at  least  one  perfectly  plain  and 
preliminary  thing  to  be  said.  It  is  said  that  art 
cannot  teach  a  lesson.  This  is  true,  and  the  only 
proper  addition  is  the  statement  that  neither,  for  the 
matter  of  that,  can  morality  teach  a  lesson.  For  a 
thing  to  be  didactic,  in  the  strict  and  narrow  and 
scholastic  sense,  it  must  be  something  about  facts  or 
the  physical  sciences  :  you  can  only  teach  a  lesson 
about  such  a  thing  as  Euclid  or  the  making  of  paper 
boats.  The  thing  is  quite  inapplicable  to  the  great 
needs  of  man,  whether  moral  or  aesthetic.  Nobody 
ever  held  a  class  in  philanthropy  with  fifteen  million- 
aires in  a  row  writing  cheques.  Nobody  ever  held 
evening  continuation  classes  in  martyrdom,  or  drilled 
boys  in  a  playground  to  die  for  their  country.  A 


u 
u 
o 

CO 


O 

DC 

u. 


O 

te 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

picture  cannot  give  a  plain  lesson  in  morals ;  neither 
can  a  sermon.  A  didactic  poem  was  a  thing  known 
indeed  among  the  ancients  and  the  old  Latin  civili- 
zation, but  as  a  matter  of  fact  it  scarcely  ever  professed 
to  teach  people  how  to  live  the  higher  life.  It  taught 
people  how  to  keep  bees. 

Since  we  find,  therefore,  that  ethics  is  like  art,  a 
mystic  and  intuitional  affair,  the  only  question  that 
remains  is,  have  they  any  kinship  ?  If  they  have  not, 
a  man  is  not  a  man,  but  two  men  and  probably  more  : 
if  they  have,  there  is,  to  say  the  least  of  it,  at  any  rate 
a  reasonable  possibility  that  a  note  in  moral  feeling 
might  have  affinity  with  a  note  in  art,  that  a  curve 
in  law,  so  to  speak,  may  repeat  a  curve  in  draughts- 
manship, that  there  may  be  genuine  and  not  artificial 
correspondences  between  a  state  of  morals  and  an 
effect  in  painting.  This  would,  I  should  tentatively 
suggest,  appear  to  be  a  most  reasonable  hypothesis. 
It  is  not  so  much  the  fact  that  there  is  no  such  thing 
as  allegorical  art,  but  rather  the  fact  that  there  is 
no  art  that  is  not  allegorical.  But  the  meanings 
expressed  in  high  and  delicate  art  are  not  to  be  classed 
under  cheap  and  external  ethical  formulae,  they  deal 
with  strange  vices  and  stranger  virtues.  Art  is 
only  unmoral  in  so  far  as  most  morality  is  immoral. 
Thus  Mr.  Whistler  when  he  drops  a  spark  of  perfect 
yellow  or  violet  into  some  glooming  pool  of  the 
nocturnal  Thames  is,  in  all  probability,  enunciating 
some  sharp  and  wholesome  moral  comment.  When 
the  young  Impressionists  paint  dim  corners  of  meadows 
or  splashes  of  sunlight  in  the  wood,  this  does  not  mean 
necessarily  that  they  are  unmoral ;  it  may  only  mean 
that  they  are  a  very  original  and  sincere  race  of  stern 
young  moralists. 

Now  if  we  adopt  this  general  theory  of  the  exist- 
ence of  genuine  correspondences  between  art  and 

57 


GEORGE    FREDERICK   WATTS 

moral  beauty,  of  the  existence,  that  is  to  say,  of 
genuine  allegories,  it  is  perfectly  clear  wherein  the 
test  of  such  genuineness  must  consist.  It  must 
consist  in  the  nature  of  the  technique.  If  the  tech- 
nique, considered  as  technique,  is  calculated  to  evoke 
in  us  a  certain  kind  of  pleasure,  and  there  is  an  analogous 
pleasure  in  the  meaning  considered  as  meaning,  then 
there  is  a  true  wedding  of  the  arts.  But  if  the  pleasure 
in  the  technique  be  of  a  kind  quite  dissimilar  in  its 
own  sphere  to  the  pleasure  in  the  spiritual  suggestion, 
then  it  is  a  mechanical  and  unlawful  union,  and 
this  philosophy,  at  any  rate,  forbids  the  banns.  If 
the  intellectual  conceptions  uttered  in  Michel  Angelo's 
Day  of  Judgment  in  the  Sistine  Chapel  were  the  effect 
of  a  perfect  and  faultless  workmanship,  but  the  work- 
manship such  as  we  should  admire  in  a  Gothic  missal 
or  a  picture  by  Gerard  Dow,  we  should  then  say 
that  absolute  excellence  in  both  departments  did  not 
excuse  their  being  joined.  The  thing  would  have 
been  a  mere  accident,  or  convenience.  Just  as  two 
plotters  might  communicate  by  means  of  a  bar  or 
two  of  music,  so  these  subtle  harmonies  of  colour  and 
form  would  have  been  used  for  their  detached  and 
private  ends  by  the  dark  conspirators  of  morality. 

Now  there  is  nothing  in  the  world  that  is  really 
so  thoroughly  characteristic  of  Watts'  technique  as 
the  fact  that  it  does  almost  startlingly  correspond 
to  the  structure  of  his  spiritual  sense.  If  such  pictures 
as  The  Dweller  in  the  Innermost  and  Mammon  and 
Diana  and  Endymion  and  Eve  Repentant  had  neither 
title  nor  author,  if  no  one  had  heard  of  Watts  or 
heard  of  Eve ;  if,  for  the  matter  of  that,  the  pic- 
tures had  neither  human  nor  animal  form,  it  would  be 
possible  to  guess  something  of  the  painter's  attitude 
from  the  mere  colour  and  line.  If  Watts  painted  an 
arabesque,  it  would  be  moral ;  if  he  designed  a  Turkey 
58 


LORD    LYTTON. 


GEORGE    FREDERICK   WATTS 

carpet,  it  would  be  stoical.  So  individual  is  his 
handling  that  his  very  choice  and  scale  of  colours 
betray  him.  A  man  with  a  keen  sense  of  the  spiritual 
and  symbolic  history  of  colours  could  guess  at  some- 
thing about  Watts  from  the  mess  on  his  palette.  He 
would  see  giants  and  the  sea  and  cold  primeval  dawns 
and  brown  earth-men  and  red  earth-women  lying 
in  the  heaps  of  greens  and  whites  and  reds,  like  forces 
in  chaos  before  the  first  day  of  creation.  A  certain 
queer  and  yet  very  simple  blue  there  is,  for  instance, 
which  is  like  Titian's  and  yet  not  like  it,  'which  is 
more  lustrous  and  yet  not  less  opaque,  and  which 
manages  to  suggest  the  north  rather  than  Titian's 
south,  in  spite  of  its  intensity ;  which  suggests  also 
the  beginning  of  things  rather  than  their  maturity ; 
a  hot  spring  of  the  earth  rather  than  Titian's  opulent 
summer.  Then  there  is  that  tremendous  autoch- 
thonous red,  which  was  the  colour  of  Adam,  whose 
name  was  Red  Earth.  It  is,  if  one  may  say  so,  the 
clay  in  which  no  one  works,  except  Watts  and  the 
Eternal  Potter.  There  are  other  colours  that  have 
this  character,  a  character  indescribable  except  by 
saying  that  they  come  from  the  palette  of  Creation 
— a  green  especially  that  reappears  through  portraits, 
allegories,  landscapes,  heroic  designs,  but  always  has 
the  same  fierce  and  elfish  look,  like  a  green  that  has 
a  secret.  It  may  be  seen  in  the  signet  ring  of  Owen 
Meredith,  and  in  the  eyes  of  the  Dweller  in  the  Inner- 
most. But  all  these  colours  have,  as  I  say,  the  first 
and  most  characteristic  and  most  obvious  of  the 
mental  qualities  of  Watts ;  they  are  simple  and  like 
things  just  made  by  God.  Nor  is  it,  I  think,  altogether 
fanciful  to  push  this  analogy  or  harmony  a  step 
further  and  to  see  in  the  colours  and  the  treatment 
of  them  the  other  side  or  typical  trait  which  I  have 
frequently  mentioned  as  making  up  the  identity 

59 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

of  the  painter.  He  is,  as  I  say,  a  stoic  ;  therefore  to 
some  extent,  at  least,  a  pagan ;  he  has  no  special 
sympathy  with  Celtic  intensity,  with  Catholic  mysti- 
cism, with  Romanticism,  with  all  the  things  that  deal 
with  the  cells  of  the  soul,  with  agonies  and  dreams. 
And  I  think  a  broad  distinction  between  the  finest 
pagan  and  the  finest  Christian  point  of  view  may  be 
found  in  such  an  approximate  phrase  as  this,  that 
paganism  deals  always  with  a  light  shining  on  things, 
Christianity  with  a  light  shining  through  them. 
That  is  why  the  whole  Renaissance  colouring  is 
opaque,  the  whole  Pre-Raphaelite  colouring  trans- 
parent. The  very  sky  of  Rubens  is  more  solid  than 
the  rocks  of  Giotto  :  it  is  like  a  noble  cliff  of  imme- 
morial blue  marble.  The  artists  of  the  devout  age 
seemed  to  regret  that  they  could  not  make  the  light 
show  through  everything,  as  it  shows  through  the 
little  wood  in  the  wonderful  Nativity  of  Botticelli. 
And  that  is  why,  again,  Christianity,  which  has  been 
attacked  so  strangely  as  dull  and  austere,  invented 
the  thing  which  is  more  intoxicating  than  all  the  wines 
of  the  world,  stained-glass  windows. 

Now   Watts,   with   all  his   marvellous   spirituality, 

or  rather  because  of  his  peculiar  type  of  marvellous 

spirituality,  has  the  Platonic,  the  philosophic,  rather 

than  the  Catholic  order  of  mysticism.     And  it  can 

scarcely   be   a   coincidence   that   here   again   we   feel 

it  to  be  something  that  could  almost  be  deduced  from 

the  colours  if  they  were  splashed  at  random  about  a 

canvas.     The  colours  are  mystical,  but  they  are  not 

transparent ;    that   is,    not   transparent   in   the   very 

curious  but  unmistakable  sense  in  which  the  colours 

of  Botticelli  or  Rossetti  are  transparent.     What  they 

are  can  only  be  described  as  iridescent.     A  curious 

lustre  or  glitter,  conveyed  chiefly  by  a  singular  and 

individual  brushwork,  lies  over  all  his  great  pictures. 

60 


DAWN. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

It  is  the  dawn  of  things  :  it  is  the  glow  of  the  primal 
sense  of  wonder  ;  it  is  the  sun  of  the  childhood  of 
the  world ;  it  is  the  light  that  never  was  on  sea  or 
land  ;  but  still  it  is  a  light  shining  on  things,  not 
shining  through  them.  It  is  a  light  which  exhibits 
and  does  honour  to  this  world,  not  a  light  that  breaks 
in  upon  this  world  to  bring  it  terror  or  comfort, 
like  the  light  that  suddenly  peers  round  the  corner 
of  some  dark  Gothic  chapel  with  its  green  or  golden 
or  blood-red  eyes.  The  Gothic  artists,  as  I  say, 
would  have  liked  men's  bodies  to  become  like  burning 
glass  (as  the  figures  in  their  windows  do),  that  the 
light  might  pass  through  them.  There  is  no  fear  of 
light  passing  through  Watts'  Cain. 

These  analogies  must  inevitably  appear  fantastic 
to  those  who  do  not  accept  the  general  hypothesis 
of  a  possible  kinship  between  pictorial  and  moral 
harmonies  in  the  psychology  of  men ;  but  to  those 
who  do  accept  this  not  very  extravagant  hypothesis, 
it  may,  I  think,  be  repeated  by  way  of  summary, 
that  the  purely  technical  question  of  Watts'  colour 
scheme  does  provide  us,  at  least  suggestively,  with 
these  two  parallels.  Watts,  so  far  as  his  moral  and 
mental  attitude  can  be  expressed  by  any  phrases  of 
such  brevity,  has  two  main  peculiarities  :  first,  a 
large  infantile  poetry  which  delights  in  things  fresh, 
raw,  and  gigantic  ;  second,  a  certain  Greek  restraint 
and  agnostic  severity,  which  throws  a  strong  light  on 
this  world  as  it  is.  The  colours  he  uses  have  also 
two  main  peculiarities  :  first,  a  fresh,  raw,  and,  as  it 
were,  gigantic  character  ;  secondly,  an  opaque  reflected 
light,  unlike  the  mediaeval  lighting,  a  strong  light 
thrown  on  this  world  as  it  is. 

Similar  lines  of  comparison,  so  far  as  they  appear 
to  possess  any  value,  could,  of  course,  be  very  easily 
pointed  out  in  connexion  with  the  character  of 

61 


GEORGE   FREDERICK    WATTS 

Watts'  draughtsmanship.  That  his  lines  are  simple 
and  powerful,  that  both  in  strength  and  weakness 
they  are  candid  and  austere,  that  they  are  not  Celtic, 
not  Catholic,  and  not  romantic  lines  of  draughts- 
manship, would,  I  think,  appear  sufficiently  clear  to 
anyone  who  has  any  instinct  for  this  mode  of  judgment 
at  all.  In  the  matter  of  line  and  composition,  of  course, 
the  same  general  contention  applies  as  in  the  case  of 
colour.  The  curve  of  the  bent  figure  of  Hope,  con- 
sidered simply  as  a  curve,  half  repeating  as  it  does  the 
upper  curve  of  the  globe,  suggests  a  feeling,  a  sense  of 
fear,  of  simplicity,  of  something  which  lies  near  to 
the  nature  of  the  idea  itself,  the  idea  which  inspires 
the  title  of  the  picture.  The  splendid  rushing 
whirlpool  of  curves  which  constitutes,  as  it  were,  the 
ellipse  of  the  two  figures  in  Diana  and  Endymion 
is  a  positive  inspiration.  It  is,  simply  as  a  form  for 
a  picture,  a  mere  scheme  of  lines,  the  very  soul  of 
Greece.  It  is  simple  ;  it  is  full  and  free  ;  it  follows 
great  laws  of  harmony,  but  it  follows  them  swiftly 
and  at  will ;  it  is  headlong,  and  yet  at  rest,  like  the 
solid  arch  of  a  waterfall.  It  is  a  rushing  and  passionate 
meeting  of  two  superb  human  figures ;  and  it  is 
almost  a  mathematical  harmony.  Technically,  at 
least,  and  as  a  matter  of  outlines,  it  is  probably  the 
artist's  masterpiece. 

Before  we  quit  this  second  department  of  the 
temperament  of  Watts,  as  expressed  in  his  line, 
mention  must  be  made  of  what  is  beyond  all  question 
the  most  interesting  and  most  supremely  personal 
of  all  the  elements  in  the  painter's  designs  and 
draughtsmanship.  That  is,  of  course,  his  magnificent 
discovery  of  the  artistic  effect  of  the  human  back. 
The  back  is  the  most  awful  and  mysterious  thing  in 
the  universe  :  it  is  impossible  to  speak  about  it.  It  is 
the  part  of  man  that  he  knows  nothing  of ;  like  an 
62 


EVE    REPENTANT. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

outlying  province  forgotten  by  an  emperor.  It  is 
a  common  saying  that  anything  may  happen  behind 
our  backs  :  transcendentally  considered  the  thing 
has  an  eerie  truth  about  it.  Eden  may  be  behind 
our  backs,  or  Fairyland.  But  this  mystery  of  the 
human  back  has  again  its  other  side  in  the  strange 
impression  produced  on  those  behind  :  to  walk 
behind  anyone  along  a  lane  is  a  thing  that,  properly 
speaking,  touches  the  oldest  nerve  of  awe.  Watts 
has  realized  this  as  no  one  in  art  or  letters  has  realized 
it  in  the  whole  history  of  the  world  :  it  has  made  him 
great.  There  is  one  possible  exception  to  his  monopoly 
of  this  magnificent  craze.  Two  thousand  years 
before,  in  the  dark  scriptures  of  a  nomad  people, 
it  had  been  said  that  their  prophet  saw  the  immense 
Creator  of  all  things,  but  only  saw  Him  from  behind. 
I  do  not  know  whether  even  Watts  would  dare  to 
paint  that.  But  it  reads  like  one  of  his  pictures, 
like  the  most  terrific  of  all  his  pictures,  which  he  has 
kept  veiled. 

I  need  not  instance  the  admirable  and  innumerable 
cases  of  this  fine  and  individual  effect.  Eve  Repentant 
(that  fine  picture),  in  which  the  agony  of  a  gigantic 
womanhood  is  conveyed  as  it  could  not  be  conveyed 
by  any  power  of  visage,  in  the  powerful  contortion  of 
the  muscular  and  yet  beautiful  back,  is  the  first  that 
occurs  to  the  mind.  The  sad  and  sardonic  picture 
painted  in  later  years,  For  He  had  Great  Possessions — 
showing  the  young  man  of  the  Gospel  loaded  with 
his  intolerable  pomp  of  garments  and  his  head  sunken 
out  of  sight — is  of  course  another.  Others  are 
slighter  instances,  like  Good  Luck  to  your  Fishing.  He 
has  again  carried  the  principle,  in  one  instance,  to 
an  extreme  seldom  adopted,  I  should  fancy,  either 
by  artist  or  man.  He  has  painted  a  very  graceful 
portrait  of  his  wife,  in  which  that  lady's  face  is  entirely 

63 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

omitted,  the  head  being  abruptly  turned  away. 
But  it  is  indeed  idle  to  multiply  these  instances  of 
the  painter's  hobby  (if  one  may  use  the  phrase)  of 
the  worship  of  the  human  back,  when  all  such  in- 
stances have  been  dwarfed  and  overshadowed  by  the 
one  famous  and  tremendous  instance  that  everyone 
knows.  Love  and  Death  is  truly  a  great  achievement : 
if  it  stood  alone  it  would  have  made  a  man  great. 
And  it  fits  in  with  a  peculiar  importance  with  the 
general  view  I  am  suggesting  of  the  Watts  technique. 
For  the  whole  picture  really  hangs,  both  technically 
and  morally,  upon  one  single  line,  a  line  that  could 
be  drawn  across  a  blank  canvas,  the  spine-line  of  the 
central  figure  of  Death  with  its  great  falling  garment. 
The  whole  composition,  the  whole  conception,  and, 
I  was  going  to  say,  the  whole  moral  of  the  picture, 
could  be  deduced  from  that  single  line.  The  moral 
of  the  picture  (if  moral  were  the  right  phrase  for 
these  things)  is,  it  is  scarcely  necessary  to  point  out, 
the  monument  of  about  as  noble  a  silence  and  sup- 
pression as  the  human  mind  ever  bent  itself  to  in  its 
pride.  It  is  the  great  masterpiece  of  agnosticism. 
In  that  picture  agnosticism — not  the  cheap  and  queru- 
lous incredulity  which  abuses  the  phrase,  but  loyal 
and  consistent  agnosticism,  which  is  as  willing  to 
believe  good  as  evil  and  to  harbour  faith  as  doubt — 
has  here  its  great  and  pathetic  place  and  symbol 
in  the  house  of  the  arts.  It  is  the  artistic  embodiment 
of  reverent  ignorance  at  its  highest,  fully  as  much  as 
the  Divine  Comedy  is  the  artistic  embodiment  of 
Christianity. 

Technically,  in  a  large  number  of  cases,  it  is  probably 
true  that  Watts'  portraits,  or  some  of 'them  at  least, 
are  his  most  successful  achievements.  But  here  also 
we  find  our  general  conclusion  :  for  if  his  portraits 
are  his  best  pictures,  it  is  certainly  not  because  they 


LOVE    AND    DEATH. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

are  merely  portraits ;  if  they  are  in  some  cases  better 
than  his  symbolic  designs,  it  is  certainly  not  because 
they  are  less  symbolic.  In  his  gallery  of  great  men, 
indeed,  we  find  Watts  almost  more  himself  than 
anywhere  else.  Most  men  are  allegorical  when 
they  are  painting  allegories,  but  Watts  is  allegorical 
when  he  is  painting  an  old  alderman.  A  change 
passes  over  that  excellent  being,  a  change  of  a  kind 
to  which  aldermen  are  insufficiently  inured.  He 
begins  to  resolve  into  the  primal  elements,  to  become 
dust  and  the  shadow,  to  become  the  red  clay  of 
Adam  and  the  wind  of  God.  His  eyes  become,  in 
spite  of  his  earnest  wish,  the  fixed  stars  in  the  sky  of 
the  spirit ;  his  complexion  begins  to  show,  not 
the  unmeaning  red  of  portraits  and  miniatures,  but 
that  secret  and  living  red  which  is  within  us,  and 
which  is  the  river  of  man.  The  astounding  manner 
in  which  Watts  has,  in  some  cases,  treated  his  sitters 
is  one  of  the  most  remarkable  things  about  his 
character.  He  is  not  (it  is  almost  absurd  to  have  to 
mention  such  a  thing  about  the  almost  austere  old 
democrat)  a  man  likely  to  flatter  a  sitter  in  any 
worldly  or  conventional  sense.  Nor  is  he,  for  the 
matter  of  that,  a  man  likely  to  push  compliments 
far  from  any  motive  :  he  is  a  strict,  and  I  should 
infer  a  candid,  man.  The  type  of  virtues  he  chiefly 
admires  and  practises  are  the  reverse  of  those  which 
would  encourage  a  courtier  or  even  a  universalist. 
But  he  scarcely  ever  paints  a  man  without  making 
him  about  five  times  as  magnificent  as  he  really 
looks.  The  real  men  appear,  if  they  present  them- 
selves afterwards,  like  mean  and  unsympathetic  sketches 
from  the  Watts  original. 

The  fact  is  that  this  indescribable  primalism, 
which  we  have  noted  as  coming  out  in  the  designs, 
in  the  titles,  and  in  Watts'  very  oil-colours,  is  present 

E  65 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

in  this  matter  in  a  most  extraordinary  way.  Watts 
does  not  copy  men  at  all :  he  makes  them  over  again. 
He  dips  his  hand  in  the  clay  of  chaos  and  begins  to 
model  a  man  named  William  Morris  or  a  man  named 
Richard  Burton  :  he  is  assisted,  no  doubt,  in  some 
degree  by  a  quaint  old  text-book  called  Reality, 
with  its  stiff  but  suggestive  woodcuts  and  its  shrewd 
and  simple  old  hints.  But  the  most  that  can  be  said 
for  the  portraiture  is  that  Watts  asks  a  hint  to  come 
and  stop  with  him,  puts  the  hint  in  a  chair  in  his 
studio  and  stares  at  him.  The  thing  that  comes  out 
at  last  upon  the  canvas  is  not  generally  a  very  precise 
picture  of  the  sitter,  though,  of  course,  it  is  almost 
always  a  very  accurate  picture  of  the  universe. 

And  yet  while  this,  on  the  one  side,  is  true  enough, 
the  portraits  are  portraits,  and  very  fine  portraits. 
But  they  are  dominated  by  an  element  which  is  the 
antithesis  of  the  whole  tendency  of  modern  art,  that 
tendency  which  for  want  of  a  better  word  we  have 
to  call  by  the  absurd  name  of  optimism.  It  is  not, 
of  course,  in  reality  a  question  of  optimism  in  the 
least,  but  of  an  illimitable  worship  and  wonder 
directed  towards  the  fact  of  existence.  There  is  a 
great  deal  of  difference  between  the  optimism  which 
says  that  things  are  perfect  and  the  optimism  which 
merely  says  (with  a  more  primeval  modesty)  that  they 
are  very  good.  One  optimism  says  that  a  one-legged 
man  has  two  legs  because  it  would  be  so  dreadful 
if  he  had  not.  The  other  optimism  says  that  the  fact 
that  the  one-legged  was  born  of  a  woman,  has  a 
soul,  has  been  in  love,  and  has  stood  alive  under 
the  stars,  is  a  fact  so  enormous  and  thrilling  that,  in 
comparison,  it  does  not  matter  whether  he  has  one 
leg  or  five.  One  optimism  says  that  this  is  the  best 
of  all  possible  worlds.  The  other  says  that  it  is 
certainly  not  the  best  of  al]  possible  worlds,  but 
66 


WILLIAM    MORRIS. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK    WATTS 

it  is  the  best  of  all  possible  things  that  a  world  should 
be   possible.     Watts,    as    has    been    more   than   once 
more    or    less     definitely    suggested,     is    dominated 
throughout   by  this(  prehistoric  wonder.     A  man  to 
him,  especially  a  great  man,  is  a  thing  to  be  painted 
as  Fra  Angelico   painted    angels,   on   his    knees.     He 
has  indeed,  like  many  brilliant  men  in  the  age  that 
produced    Carlyle    and     Ruskin,     an    overwhelming 
tendency  to   hero-worship.     That  worship  had  not, 
of  course,  in  the  case  of  these  men  any  trace  of  that 
later    and    more    denaturalized    hero-worship,     the 
tendency    to    worship    madmen — to    dream    of    vast 
crimes  as  one  dreams  of  a  love-affair,   and   to  take 
the  malformation  of  the  soul  to  be  the  only  originality. 
To  the  Carlylean  (and  Watts  has  been  to  some  by 
no  means  inconsiderable  extent  a  Carlylean),  to  the 
Carlylean  the  hero,  the  great  man,  was  a  man  more 
human   than  humanity  itself.     In  worshipping  him 
you   were    worshipping   humanity    in    a    sacrament  : 
and  Watts  seems  to  express  in  almost  every  line  of 
his  brush  this  ardent  and  reverent  view  of  the  great 
man.     He   overdoes   it.     Tennyson,    fine    as   he   was 
both  physically  and  mentally,  was  not  quite  so  much 
of   a   demi-god   as   Watts'    splendid    pictures   would 
seem  to  suggest.     Many  other  sitters  have  been  sub- 
jected, past  all  recognition,  to  this  kind  of  devout 
and    ethereal   caricature.     But    the    essential   of   the 
whole   matter  was   that   the   attitude   of  Watts  was 
one  which  might  almost   be  called  worship.     It   was 
not,  of  course,  that  he  always  painted  men  as  handsome 
in  the  conventional  sense,   or  even  as  handsome  as 
they  were.     William  Morris   impressed  most  people 
as    a    very   handsome    man :     in    Watts'    marvellous 
portrait,  so  much  is  made  of  the  sanguine  face,  the 
bold   stare,    the    almost   volcanic   suddenness   of   the 
emergence  of  the  head  from  the  dark  green  background, 

E2  67 


that  the  effect  of  ordinary  good  looks,  on  which  many 
of  Morris's  intimates  would  probably  have  prided 
themselves,  is  in  some  degree  lost.  Carlyle,  again, 
when  he  saw  the  painter's  fine  rendering  of  him,  said 
with  characteristic  surliness  that  he  "  looked  like  a 
mad  labourer."  Conventionally  speaking,  it  is  of 
course,  therefore,  to  be  admitted  that  the  sitters 
did  not  always  come  off  well.  But  the  exaggeration 
or  the  distortion,  if  exaggeration  or  distortion  there 
were,  was  always  effected  in  obedience  to  some 
almost  awestruck  notion  of  the  greatness  or  goodness 
of  the  great  or  good  sitter.  The  point  is  not  whether 
Watts  sometimes  has  painted  men  as  ugly  as  they 
were  painted  by  the  primary  religious  painters ;  the 
point  is,  as  I  have  said,  that  he  painted  as  they  did, 
on  his  knees.  Now  no  one  thinks  that  Mr.  Sargent 
paints  the  Misses  Wertheimer  on  his  knees.  His 
grimness  and  decision  of  drawing  and  colouring  are 
not  due  to  a  sacred  optimism.  But  those  of  Watts 
are  due  to  this  :  are  due  to  an  intense  conviction 
that  there  is  within  the  sitter  a  great  reality  which 
has  to  give  up  its  secret  before  he  leaves  the  seat  or 
the  model's  throne.  Hence  come  the  red  violent 
face  and  minatory  eyes  of  William  Morris  :  the 
painter  sought  to  express,  and  he  did  most  successfully 
express,  the  main  traits  and  meaning  of  Morris — 
the  appearance  of  a  certain  plain  masculine  passion 
in  the  realm  of  decorative  art.  Morris  was  a  man 
who  wanted  good  wall-papers,  not  as  a  man  wants 
a  coin  of  the  Emperor  Constantine,  which  was  the 
cloistered  or  abnormal  way  in  which  men  had  commonly 
devised  such  things  :  he  wanted  good  wall-papers  as 
a  man  wants  beer.  He  clamoured  for  art  :  he  brawled 
for  it.  He  asserted  the  perfectly  virile  and  ordinary 
character  of  the  appetite  for  beauty.  And  he  possessed 
and  developed  a  power  of  moral  violence  on  pure 
68 


DANTE    GABRIEL    ROSSETTI. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

matters  of  taste  which  startled  the  flabby  world  of 
connoisseurship  and  opened  a  new  era.  He  grew 
furious  with  furniture  and  denounced  the  union 
of  wrong  colours  as  men  denounce  an  adultery.  All 
this  is  expressed  far  more  finely  than  in  these  clumsy 
sentences  in  that  living  and  leonine  head  in  the 
National  Portrait  Gallery.  It  is  exactly  the  same  with 
Carlyle.  Watts'  Carlyle  is  immeasurably  more  subtle 
and  true  than  the  Carlyle  of  Millais,  which  simply 
represents  him  as  a  shaggy,  handsome,  magnificent 
old  man.  The  uglier  Carlyle  of  Watts  has  more  of 
the  truth  about  him,  the  strange  combination  of 
a  score  of  sane  and  healthy  visions  and  views,  with 
something  that  was  not  sane,  which  bloodshot  and 
embittered  them  all,  the  great  tragedy  of  the  union 
of  a  strong  countryside  mind  and  body  with  a  disease 
of  the  vitals  and  something  like  a  disease  of  the  spirit. 
In  fact,  Watts  painted  Carlyle  "  like  a  mad  labourer  " 
because  Carlyle  was  a  mad  labourer. 

This  general  characteristic  might  of  course  be 
easily  traced  in  all  the  portraits  one  by  one.  If 
space  permitted,  indeed,  such  a  process  might  be 
profitable  ;  for  while  we  take  careful  note  of  all  the 
human  triviality  of  faces,  the  one  thing  that  we  all 
tend  to  forget  is  that  divine  and  common  thing  which 
Watts  celebrates.  It  is  the  misfortune  of  the  non- 
religious  ages  that  they  tend  to  cultivate  a  sense  of 
individuality,  not  only  at  the  expense  of  religion,  but 
at  the  expense  of  humanity  itself.  For  the  modern 
portrait-painter  not  only  does  not  see  the  image  of 
God  in  his  sitters,  he  does  not  even  see  the  image  of 
man.  His  object  is  not  to  insist  on  the  glorious  and 
solemn  heritage  which  is  common  to  Sir  William 
Harcourt  and  Mr.  Albert  Chevalier,  to  Count  Tolstoy 
and  Mr.  Wanklyn,  that  is  the  glorious  and  solemn 
heritage  of  a  nose  and  two  eyes  and  a  mouth.  The 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

effort  of  the  dashing  modern  is  rather  to  make  each 
of  these  features  individual  almost  to  the  point  of 
being  incredible :    it  is  his  desire  to  paint  the  mouth 
whose    grimace    is    inimitable,    the    eyes    that    could 
be  only  in  one  head,  and  the  nose  that  never  was  on 
sea  or  land.     There  is  value  in  this  purely  personal 
treatment,   but   something  in  it  so  constantly  lost  : 
the  quality  of  the  common  humanity.     The  new  art 
gallery  is  too  like  a  museum  of  freaks,  it  is  too  wild 
and   wonderful,    like    a    realistic    novel.     Watts    errs 
undoubtedly   on   the   other   side.     He  makes  all  his 
portraits  too  classical.     It  may  seem  like  a  paradox 
to  say  that  he  makes  them  too  human ;  but  humanity 
is   a    dassis   and   therefore   classical.     He   recurs   too 
much  to  the  correct  type  which  includes  all  men. 
He  has,  for  instance,  a  worship  of  great  men  so  com- 
plete  that   it   makes   him   tend  in   the   direction   of 
painting  them   all  alike.     There  may  be  too  much 
of  Browning  in  his  Tennyson,  too  much  of  Tennyson 
in    his    Browning.     There    is    certainly    a    touch    of 
Manning  in  his  John  Stuart  Mill,  and  a  touch  of  the 
Minotaur  in  many  of  his  portraits  of  Imperial  poli- 
ticians.    While  he  celebrates  the  individual  with  a 
peculiar  insight,  it  is  nevertheless  always  referred  to 
a  general  human  type.     We  feel  when  we  look  at 
even    the    most    extraordinary    of    Watts'    portraits, 
as,  for  instance,   the  portrait  of  Lord   Stratford   de 
Redcliffe,    that    before   Lord   Stratford   de   Redcliffe 
was  born,  and  apart  from  that  fact,  there  was  such  a 
thing  as  a  human  being.     When  we  look  at  a  brilliant 
modern  canvas  like  that  of  Mr.  Sargent's  portrait  of 
Wertheimer,  we  do  not  feel  that  any  human  being 
analogous  to  him  had  of  necessity  existed.     We  feel 
that  Mr.  Wertheimer  might  have  been  created  before 
the  stars.     Watts  has  a  tendency  to  resume  his  char- 
acters into  his  background  as  if  they  were  half  returning 
70 


THOMAS    CARLYLE. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

to  the  forces  of  nature.  In  his  more  successful  por- 
traits the  actual  physical  characteristics  of  the  sitter 
appear  to  be  something  of  the  nature  of  artistic 
creations ;  they  are  decorative  and  belong  to  a  whole. 
We  feel  that  he  has  filled  in  the  fiery  orange  of  Swin- 
burne's hair  as  one  might  fill  in  a  gold  or  copper 
panel.  We  know  that  he  was  historically  correct  in 
making  the  hair  orange,  but  we  cannot  get  rid  of  a 
haunting  feeling  that  if  his  scheme  had  been  a  little 
different  he  would  have  made  it  green.  This  inde- 
scribable sentiment  is  particularly  strong  in  the  case 
of  the  portrait  of  Rossetti.  Rossetti  is  dressed  in  a 
dark  green  coat  which  perfectly  expresses  his  sumptuous 
Pre-Raphaelite  affectation.  But  we  do  not  feel  that 
Rossetti  has  adopted  the  dark  green  coat  to  suit  his 
dark  red  beard.  We  rather  feel  that  if  anyone  had 
seized  Rossetti  and  forcibly  buttoned  him  up  in  the 
dark  green  coat  he  would  have  grown  the  red  beard 
by  sheer  force  of  will. 

Before  we  quit  the  subject  of  portraiture  a  word 
ought  to  be  said  about  two  exceedingly  noble  portraits, 
those  of  Matthew  Arnold  and  Cardinal  Manning. 
The  former  is  interesting  because,  as  an  able  critic 
said  somewhere  (I  wish  I  could  remember  who  he  was 
or  where  he  wrote),  this  is  the  one  instance  of  Watts 
approaching  tentatively  a  man  whom  he  in  all  reason- 
able probability  did  not  understand.  In  this  par- 
ticular case  the  picture  is  a  hundred  times  better  for 
that.  The  portrait-painter  of  Matthew  Arnold  ob- 
viously ought  not  to  understand  him,  since  he  did 
not  understand  himself.  And  the  bewilderment 
which  the  artist  felt  for  those  few  hours  reproduced 
in  a  perfect,  almost  in  an  immortal,  picture  the 
bewilderment  which  the  sitter  felt  from  the  cradle  to 
the  grave.  The  bewilderment  of  Matthew  Arnold 
was  more  noble  and  faithful  than  most  men's  certainty, 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

and  Watts  has  not  failed  to  give  that  nobility  a  place 
even  greater  perhaps  than  that  which  he  would  have 
given  to  it  had  he  been  working  on  that  fixed  theory  of 
admiration  in  which  he  dealt  with  Tennyson  or 
Morris.  The  sad  sea-blue  eyes  of  Matthew  Arnold 
seemed  to  get  near  to  the  fundamental  sadness  of  blue. 
It  is  a  certain  eternal  bleakness  in  the  colour  which 
may  for  all  I  know  have  given  rise  to  the  legend  of 
blue  devils.  There  are  times  at  any  rate  when  the 
bluest  heavens  appear  only  blue  with  those  devils. 
The  portrait  of  Cardinal  Manning  is  worth  a  further 
and  special  notice,  because  it  is  an  illustration  of  the 
fact  to  which  I  have  before  alluded  :  the  fact  that 
while  Watts  in  one  sense  always  gets  the  best  out  of 
his  sitters,  he  does  not  by  any  means  always  get  the 
handsomest  out  of  them.  Manning  was  a  singularly 
fine-looking  man,  even  in  his  emaciation.  A  friend  of 
mine,  who  was  particularly  artistic  both  by  instinct  and 
habits,  gazed  for  a  long  time  at  a  photograph  of  the 
terrible  old  man  clad  in  those  Cardinal's  robes  and 
regalia  in  which  he  exercised  more  than  a  Cardinal's 
power,  and  said  reflectively,  "  He  would  have  made  his 
fortune  as  a  model."  A  great  many  of  the  photo- 
graphs of  Manning,  indeed  almost  any  casual  glimpses 
of  him,  present  him  as  more  beautiful  than  he  appears 
in  Watts'  portrait.  To  the  ordinary  onlooker  there 
was  behind  the  wreck  of  flesh  and  the  splendid  skeleton 
the  remains  of  a  very  handsome  English  gentleman ; 
relics  of  one  who  might  have  hunted  foxes  and  married 
an  American  heiress.  Watts  has  no  eyes  for  anything 
except  that  sublime  vow  which  he  would  himself 
repudiate,  that  awful  Church  which  he  would  himself 
disown.  He  exaggerates  the  devotionalism  of  Man- 
ning. He  is  more  ascetic  than  the  ascetics ;  more 
Catholic  than  Catholicism.  Just  so,  he  would  be,  if 
he  were  painting  the  Sheik-el-Islam,  more  Moslem 
72 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

than  the  Mohammedans.     He  has  no  eyes   but  for 
ideas. 

Watts'  allegories  and  Watts'  portraits  exhaust 
the  subject  of  his  art.  It  is  true  that  he  has  on  rare 
occasions  attempted  pictures  merely  reproducing 
the  externals  of  the  ordinary  earth.  It  is  characteristic 
of  him  that  he  should  have  once,  for  no  apparent 
reason  in  particular,  painted  a  picture  of  two  cart- 
horses and  a  man.  It  is  still  more  characteristic 
of  him  that  this  one  picture  of  a  trivial  group  in  the 
street  should  be  so  huge  as  to  dwarf  many  of  his 
largest  and  most  transcendental  canvases ;  that  the 
incidental  harmless  drayman  should  be  more  gigantic 
than  the  Prince  of  this  World  or  Adam  or  the  Angel 
of  Death.  He  condescends  to  a  detail  and  makes  the 
detail  more  vast  than  a  cosmic  allegory.  One  picture, 
called  "  The  First  Oyster,"  he  is  reported  to  have 
painted  in  response  to  a  challenge  which  accused  him 
or  his  art  of  lacking  altogether  the  element  of  humour. 
The  charge  is  interesting,  because  it  suggests  a  com- 
parison with  the  similar  charge  commonly  brought 
against  Gladstone.  In  both  charges  there  is  an  element 
of  truth,  though  not  complete  truth.  Watts  proved 
no  doubt  that  he  was  not  wholly  without  humour 
by  this  admirable  picture.  Gladstone  proved  that 
he  was  not  wholly  without  humour  by  his  reply  to 
Mr.  Chaplin,  by  his  singing  of  "  Doo-dah,"  and  by 
his  support  of  a  grant  to  the  Duke  of  Coburg.  But 
both  men  were  singularly  little  possessed  by  the  mood 
or  the  idea  of  humour.  To  them  had  been  in  peculiar 
fullness  revealed  the  one  great  truth  which  our  modern 
thought  does  not  know  and  which  it  may  possibly 
perish  through  not  knowing.  They  knew  that  to 
enjoy  life  means  to  take  it  seriously.  There  is  an 
eternal  kinship  between  solemnity  and  high  spirits, 
and  almost  the  very  name  of  it  is  Gladstone.  Its  other 

73 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

name  is  Watts.  They  knew  that  not  only  life,  but 
every  detail  of  life,  is  most  a  pleasure  when  it  is 
studied  with  the  gloomiest  intensity.  They  knew 
that  the  men  who  collect  beetles  are  jollier  than  the 
men  who  kill  them,  and  that  the  men  who  worshipped 
beetles  (in  ancient  Egypt)  were  probably  the  j  oiliest 
of  all.  The  startling  cheerfulness  of  the  old  age  of 
Gladstone,  the  startling  cheerfulness  of  the  old  age 
of  Watts,  are  both  entirely  redolent  of  this  exuberant 
seriousness,  this  uproarious  gravity.  They  were  as 
happy  as  the  birds,  because,  like  the  birds,  they  were 
untainted  by  the  disease  of  laughter.  They  are  as 
awful  and  philosophical  as  children  at  play  :  indeed 
they  remind  us  of  a  truth  true  for  all  of  us,  though 
capable  of  misunderstanding,  that  the  great  aim  of  a 
man's  life  is  to  get  into  his  second  childhood. 

Of  his  work  we  have  concluded  our  general  survey. 
It  has  been  hard  in  conducting  such  a  survey  to 
avoid  the  air  of  straying  from  the  subject.  But  the 
greatest  hardness  of  the  subject  is  that  we  cannot 
stray  from  the  subject.  This  man  has  attempted, 
whether  he  has  succeeded  or  no,  to  paint  such  pictures 
of  such  things  that  no  one  shall  be  able  to  get  outside 
them  ;  that  everyone  should  be  lost  in  them  for  ever 
like  wanderers  in  a  mighty  park.  Whether  we  strike 
a  match  or  win  the  Victoria  Cross,  we  are  still  giants 
sprawling  in  Chaos.  Whether  we  hide  in  a  monastery 
or  thunder  on  a  platform,  we  are  still  standing  in  the 
Court  of  Death.  If  any  experience  at  all  is  genuine, 
it  affects  the  philosophy  of  these  pictures  ;  if  any 
halfpenny  stamp  supports  them,  they  are  the  better 
pictures ;  if  any  dead  cat  in  a  dust-bin  contradicts 
them,  they  are  the  worse  pictures.  This  is  the  great 
pathos  and  the  great  dignity  of  philosophy  and 
theology.  Men  talk  of  philosophy  and  theology  as 
if  they  were  something  specialistic  and  arid  and 

7+ 


',OOD    LUCK    TO    YOUR    FISHING. 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

academic.  But  philosophy  and  theology  are  not  only 
the  only  democratic  things,  they  are  democratic  to 
the  point  of  being  vulgar,  to  the  point,  I  was  going 
to  say,  of  being  rowdy.  They  alone  admit  all  matters  ; 
they  alone  lie  open  to  all  attacks.  All  other  sciences 
may,  while  studying  their  own,  laugh  at  the  rag-tag 
and  bobtail  of  other  sciences.  An  astronomer  may 
sneer  at  animalculse,  which  are  very  like  stars ;  an 
entomologist  may  scorn  the  stars,  which  are  very  like 
animalculae.  Physiologists  may  think  it  dirty  to 
grub  about  in  the  grass ;  botanists  may  think  it  dirtier 
to  grub  about  in  an  animal's  inside.  But  there  is 
nothing  that  is  not  relevant  to  these  more  ancient 
studies.  There  is  no  detail,  from  buttons  to  kangaroos, 
that  does  not  enter  into  the  gay  confusion  of  philosophy. 
There  is  no  fact  of  life,  from  the  death  of  a  donkey 
to  the  General  Post  Office,  which  has  not  its  place  to 
dance  and  sing  in,  in  the  glorious  Carnival  of  theology. 
Therefore  I  make  no  apology  if  I  have  asked  the 
reader,  in  the  course  of  these  remarks,  to  think  about 
things  in  general.  It  is  not  I,  but  George  Frederick 
Watts,  who  asks  the  reader  to  think  about  things  in 
general.  If  he  has  not  done  this,  he  has  failed.  If  he 
has  not  started  in  us  such  trains  of  reflection  as  I  am 
now  concluding  and  many  more  and  many  better,  he 
has  failed.  And  this  brings  me  to  my  last  word. 
Now  and  again  Watts  has  failed.  I  am  afraid  that  it 
may  possibly  be  inferred  from  the  magniloquent 
language  which  I  have  frequently,  and  with  a  full 
consciousness  of  my  act,  applied  to  this  great  man, 
that  I  think  the  whole  of  his  work  technically 
triumphant.  Clearly  it  is  not.  For  I  believe  that 
often  he  has  scarcely  known  what  he  was  doing ;  I 
believe  that  he  has  been  in  the  dark  when  the  lines 
came  wrong  ;  that  he  has  been  still  deeper  in  the  dark 
and  things  came  right.  As  I  have  already  pointed  out, 

75 


GEORGE   FREDERICK   WATTS 

the  vague  lines  which  his  mere  physical  instinct  would 
make  him  draw,  have  in  them  the  curves  of  the  Cosmos. 
His  automatic  manual  action  was,  I  think,  certainly 
a  revelation  to  others,  certainly  a  revelation  to  himself. 
Standing  before  a  dark  canvas  upon  some  quiet 
evening,  he  has  made  lines  and  something  has  happened. 
In  such  an  hour  the  strange  and  splendid  phrase  of 
the  Psalm  he  has  literally  fulfilled.  He  has  gone  on 
because  of  the  word  of  meekness  and  truth  and  of 
righteousness.  And  his  right  hand  has  taught  him 
terrible  things. 


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